International News: Bringing about the Golden Age

In this Berkman Center for Internet and Society "Media Re:public" paper, Ethan Zuckerman laments the decline of international news in the United States (US) media. He proposes that the rise of internet connectivity should herald a new age of international news access, while analysing how to make that happen.


Zuckerman cites the decrease in international coverage and international new bureaus alongside the rising demand of US news consumers for following international news - 37% to 52% over the past twenty years. Further, the Global Attention Profiles research project, which performs statistical analysis of online news sources, "suggests systematic over-coverage of a small set of nations at the expense of most of the world’s population." Blogs do not show evidence of a global focus, perhaps, as suggested here, because they are largely derivative of mainstream news sources.


The document lists five factors as a subset of the argument that is its premise: “to be an engaged citizen in a democracy, you need to understand the issues your government is engaged in and the issues it fails to engage”. These are factors which point to the need for a deeper understanding and awareness of the world through international news, including: globalisation, the rise of terrorism as the leading national security fear, migration, global warming, and public awareness and pressure on governments to intervene to prevent gross human rights abuses.


The document suggests, lacking decisive research on audience demand for international news, that "[t]hose of us who believe in the importance of international news in creating an informed citizenry... face a difficult challenge." The challenge is to persuade a "choice-rich" media audience to pay attention to international news or "[a]ternatively, … to persuade existing traditional media outlets to leverage the wealth of international news content available, and incorporate more international news into… [online] offerings."


The recommendations include research to understand media users, such as:

1. Obtaining behavioural data through research partnerships of media providers, search engines, and commercial research firms.
2. Media diaries to understand and compare online consumption with pre-internet news consumption.
3. Search data to track the flow of story-to-story choice patterns used by internet news consumers.
4. Content analysis and tracking, including blogs, to see who sets the media agendas online.
5. Distribution of different types of news in different markets, consumer satisfaction with news coverage, and possible relationships between the emphasis of media coverage and citizen involvement in political and civic issues.

Recommended online services to improve accessibility and quality of international news include:

1. Translation - possibly building a community of online translators to try to aggregate the best of citizen journalism and make it more universally available.
2. Contextualisation - perhaps an aggregated effort to make contextualisation available for online international news, so that news stories, blogs, and citizen journalist reporting have available some reliable background information that can be offered to give readers more depth.
3. Filtering - perhaps, through a system that considers the basic dynamics of the supply and demand and then supplies, as well as cultivates, an international news readership.




The suggested strategies for cultivating more international news consumption online include incorporating the ‘push’ aspect of print media (agenda setting, rather than the 'pull' of online readership from one story to another through links), reader education on the value of international news, using blog and citizen media aspects like storytelling and personal connection, and the 'serendipity' factor of discovering a story - controlled by both careful editorial structures and the development of new tools designed to put content that’s unexpectedly useful in front of users on an automated basis.


The conclusion, as stated here, is that "[c]lose attention needs to be paid to the ways in which readers discover international stories, the ways in which they follow these stories over time, and especially, how they decide to find information on stories they feel insufficiently informed about....Media outlets - commercial and otherwise - concerned with delivering international news need to experiment with new strategies in storytelling, connecting personal stories to international events, and presenting international stories in conjunction with stories more likely to catch the viewer’s eye."