Local Stories Far From Home
'Globalizing' brings world affairs into focus

by Bill Kirtz
Kirtz is an associate professor of journalism
at Northeastern University in Boston.

Following chicken parts from an Alabama processing plant to Russian dinner tables. Going home to Mexico with a Missouri popcorn plant worker. Linking Kansas job losses to Italian technology.

As newspaper researchers ponder the length and extent of readers' post-Sept. 11 interest in international developments, a growing number of journalists put a personal face on world affairs. Backed by two new programs to subsidize overseas trips, editors want to provide compelling answers to readers' perennial question - "What does it mean to me?" - and possibly overcome Americans' traditional indifference to foreign events.

A long-time advocate for international news, Kansas Editor Edward Seaton says such efforts could have given American readers a pre-Sept. 11 look at radical Islamic militancy. Seaton, president and editor of The Manhattan Mercury (evening, circulation 10,249), points out that last year's kidnapping of two Kansas missionaries by Philippine rebels linked with al Qaeda wasn't covered adequately at first. If it had received more ink, readers would have been better informed about the depth of terrorist activities worldwide.

"Readers are [now] more interested in heavy-duty international news," says Seaton. "Editors won't walk away from the need to give it to them."

Associated Press Deputy International Editor Nick Tatro also sees no post-Sept. 11 fall in member papers' use of international stories. "It's clear they're devoting more of their news holes to world events," including backgrounders and explanatory pieces, he says. Continued interest "proves the need for strong international coverage." He notes that many editors run sidebars about local businesses or military units involved in the war on terrorism.

THE LOCAL ANGLE
Burl Osborne, Associated Press president and former publisher of The Dallas Morning News, urges publishers to bring foreign coverage home.

Rhea Wessel, a former reporter for The Anniston (Ala.) Star, traveled to Russia in 1998 for a story on Alabama chicken exports.

"We've realized, particularly after Sept. 11, that international news can be almost local," he says. "In a tough economic environment, there's more use of the AP, [but] if I edited a small paper, I'd try to localize news-service stories as best I could. Local news finds you; there's almost always some local element. If you understand that if the Middle East goes up in smoke, gas goes to $5 a gallon, that's local. If your National Guard unit is in Afghanistan, that's a local story."

Chris Waddle, executive editor and vice president of The Anniston (Ala.) Star (morning, 25,956), doesn't need prodding.

Waddle says U.S. companies' "amazing amount" of foreign contacts - importing raw goods and exporting products - creates a world of opportunity for imaginative editors. Companies in Anniston, for example, make buses for Hungary, and ship timber to Japan and Taiwan that returns as furniture.

Generous international coverage doesn't break his editorial budget, either. "Our biggest [local] story since civil rights is the problem of leaking chemical weapons [that are] stored in our area. We went to Johnston Island in the South Pacific and to Russia to see how they destroy weapons. We insist on paying our own way, but it's not that expensive. Cost is just a nonstarter. All we do is go on the Internet. It's amazing how cheap travel has become."

For the same fare as a cross-country flight in the United States, a Star reporter followed chicken products from their Anniston roots to Russian tables. "Young editors and reporters know how to travel on the cheap," Waddle says. "If they're on vacation anyway, give them a few extra vacation days to do stories."

Reporters at The Atlanta Journal-Constitution don't need Travelocity searches or vacation days to do human-interest pieces on everything from local Muslims' Mecca pilgrimages to where to buy a Brazilian bikini.

"Glocalize the news," suggests Raman Narayanan, editor of the paper's eight-page weekly Atlanta and The World section. "Tell stories about ordinary people. Through them, explain international issues."

He cites exploding Latino and South Asian, and rapidly growing East Asian and African populations in his paper's circulation area, and says his readers "need to know these guys. They live down the block from you. Their kids go to school with yours. They're Atlantans, too."

Narayanan says the 7-month-old section draws overwhelmingly favorable phone and e-mail. He says that's because he avoids the "f" and "g" words - foreign and globalization. His five reporters humanize international issues through profiles of a Pakistani immigrant, a Zimbabwean political refugee and an Arab community organizer, covering "world news as it plays out in their lives." Although Narayanan says his section's subtext is globalization, "I don't use that word because peoples' eyes glaze over."

SPARKING INTEREST
Still, Sept. 11 events and the aftermath haven't focused those eyes much, according to The Pew Research Center for the People and the Press in Washington, D.C. An April 26-May 12 survey of 3,002 U.S. adults found the public's news habits largely unaffected. "There is no evidence that the [public's] appetite for international news extends much beyond terrorism and the Middle East," according to the survey report. And the percentage of respondents who read a newspaper "yesterday" continued to decline - from 58 percent in 1993 to 41 percent in 2002.

Director Andrew Kohut says although Americans take less of an "it doesn't apply to me" attitude to world events after Sept. 11, stories from abroad still "face the traditional problems of international news, with the public having trouble understanding the background. They're not seeing them as relevant, and [the stories are] too full of conflict."

He adds, though, that publishers should be encouraged that the small and valuable base of U.S. citizens who say they follow international news "very closely" has increased from 14-to-21 percent during the last two years. And 44 percent of male college graduates ages 40 and older fall in this category, compared with 28 percent in 2000.

"These people are [newspapers'] core constituency: middle aged and better educated," Kohut says. "They're disproportionately important - more dedicated, not casual, readers."

Kohut agrees that the key to getting more readers interested in international stories is to "make it apparent to ordinary Americans why these stories are relevant. Don't write as if you're talking down, but give [readers] the background to grasp what's going on."

This accords with a Knight Ridder customer acquisition-and-retention study presented at NAA's July 2001 Research Conference. The survey of 11,865 adults in KR's 14 largest markets showed that the 68 percent of adults who peruse papers up to four times a week will read more nonlocal stories if they see how these stories affect them; straight reporting without this tie-in won't help. The study also found that international news ranked second among six topics that can attract more readers. Improved local news would attract 21 percent of those occasional readers, followed by international news, 8 percent; health and health care, 5 percent; sports, 4 percent; and advertising and entertainment, 3 percent each.

The Readership Institute at Northwestern University in Evanston, Ill., offers bad and good news about interest in international coverage. Research Manager Stacy Lynch says a post-Sept. 11 circulation "up tick made a lot of people think that was the start of a renaissance, but unfortunately people aren't going to change" their reading habits.

Yet the institute's 2000 Impact study of 100 papers found that coverage of international conflict and global relations ranks third among 26 topics that would make readers spend more time with the paper. "There's a higher interest in international news than we expected. It's a growth field," Lynch says.

San Antonio Express-News Editor Robert Rivard says "Understanding the American public is a far less simple proposition" than research would indicate. "I've never disbelieved in Americans' appetite for foreign news. You can ask whether someone is concerned with the North American Free Trade Agreement, or ask whether they're interested in trucks getting free passage between countries. You'll get different answers. Lots of people, besides the college educated, care if you put it in a context they can relate to."

Stephen Hess, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution in Washington, D.C., who writes about foreign coverage, shares the view that publishers have a special role in providing world news. He doesn't doubt the Pew findings, but thinks editors should provide more foreign coverage regardless of reader interest.

Hess complains that outside the country's largest newspapers, international events have "gotten off the front page very fast - evaporated into the ether - and it's too bad. Sept. 11 should have been a wake-up call. Interest may have peaked [since then], but it doesn't cost much more for newspapers to use more wire and supplementary news services. It's all there for the picking." Editorial gatekeepers, Hess says, "short-change the American people."

Ray Hiebert, author of books about foreign-news coverage and dean emeritus of the University of Maryland's College of Journalism in College Park, adds a bottom-line argument:

Publishers "are missing a big bet by not doing more," he says. "We have our heads in the sand, but that could slowly change. We have a rising immigrant population which, unlike older generations, is interested in its roots - a growing potential audience of people who want to keep up with their native cultures and countries."

Palestinian and Israeli supporters clash during an April protest in Atlanta. Photo by Bita Hanavar, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

GOING GLOBAL
Two new programs help smaller dailies bring international developments home. The American Committee of the International Press Institute has just awarded five papers $5,000 Knight Foundation grants to encourage editors to localize global events. View the awards at http://www.freemedia.at/index1.htmlhtml.

Kim Estes McCully, editor of the twice-weekly 3,335-circulation Aurora (Mo.) Advertiser, will use a grant to do some 30 stories after two 10-day trips to Ontario, Canada, and Mexico to study how manufacturing innovation and cheap labor helped revive Aurora's failing shoe factory.

McCully finds intense grass-roots interest in world affairs, pointing out that almost all of the Aurora Rotary Club's 30 members have international connections.

Another recipient, Ron Graber, managing editor of the 4,000-circulation Carthage (Mo.) Press, has just returned from a week-long trip to Ameca, Mexico, with Anita Topete, a worker at a Carthage popcorn factory.

"We've been struggling to cover the [growing] Hispanic community," he says. "We weren't telling the story. We wanted to put a face on it." Graber's front-page series will focus on Topete's family, work environment and the economic importance of the money she sends home.

"Readers think that international news means the leader of Albania and they don't relate," says Graber. "We can teach them that what happens across the border is important to them."

Tom Shine, assistant managing editor of The Wichita Eagle (morning, 91,173), used his $5,000 grant to help send a reporter to investigate the loss of aerospace jobs to foreign countries. Reporter Molly McMillin visited a Moscow engineering-design firm and Italian production plants used by The Boeing Co., the city's largest employer.

Even before the grant, Shine had increased international news coverage by a daily average of two to three columns. He expanded his news hole by 20 percent in doing so, and estimates that international news comprises 15-to-20 percent of the average daily news hole.

"Interest in overseas will wear out at some point," he predicts, although readers frequently call to say, "We wish you'd write more about the world."

The Knight Foundation will give 10 dailies - with circulations ranging from 30,000 to 200,000 - $6,000 to $12,000 each in World Affairs Journalism Fellowships this year.

David J. Anable, president of the International Center for Journalists and program administrator, says these awards, for "gatekeeper" editors of papers without foreign correspondents, will increase their awareness of the importance of overseas coverage. To learn more about this program, visit www.icfj.org.

This winter, recipients will begin one- to three-week global assignments of direct interest to their communities. Among the projects tentatively approved: Chinese furniture manufacturers' impact on North Carolina commerce, efforts by farmers in the

Republic of Kazakhstan to fight the same cattle disease decimating Wyoming's buffalo herds, and the effects of a program that gives Northern Ireland children Montana vacations.

Anable, a former managing editor of The Christian Science Monitor in Boston, concedes that post-Sept. 11 interest in international news has diminished, but predicts a resurgence, "because we're not a tight, safe, insulated island anymore. There's a matter of self-interest in understanding world events."

Anable was delighted to get 43 applications before last summer's deadline, because the ICJ has had a hard time recruiting reporters for short-term assignments. "Sometimes, it's difficult to get in the newsroom door. In a tight economy, people are afraid time off will mean that their job's not there when they come back."

Anniston's Waddle wants news executives to make an attitude adjustment: "They think foreign news is strange occurrences in strange lands, but it's really local news projected someplace else." Make it relevant, he says. "If [editors] perceive it as that awful word - 'foreign' - they signal the reader, 'You're not going to like this.' But if you see it as news without borders, you can make a local connection. Simply project a local story to its logical conclusion."

Corrections:
Burl Osborne’s title was incorrect. He is chairman of The Associated Press board of directors and former publisher of The Dallas Morning News. Presstime regrets the error.

The Special Report sidebar, “A Revived Monitor”, contained incorrect information about The Christian Science Monitor in Boston. The story should have said that the Monitor’s circulation reached a high of 191,501 in 1988. Presstime regrets the error.