Dr. Ink had a wonderful conversation recently with a Japanese journalist stationed in Washington, D.C. He asked the Doc why the American news media have traditionally shied away from international news — except in times of war.
Doc’s first instinct, as usual, was to blame readers. Americans are proudly independent, ethnocentric, xenophobic, and nativistic, argued the Doc, while showing off his flashy vocabulary. Some readers may say in a survey or focus group that they are internationalists, but, where the rubber meets the road, they are raving localists.
This led Doc to a memory of a great parody of American newspapers. The lead story satirized the need for papers to localize every story. The headline read something like: “Local Couple’s Vacation Ruined.” Then came the subhead: “Japan Destroyed in Earthquake.”
It occurred to Doc that the fault might lie not in our readers, Horatio, but in ourselves. Isn’t it the job of journalists to demonstrate the relevance of international news to a disinterested audience, to make the important interesting?
Doc thought of all those millions of subscribers and readers of a magazine called National Geographic. (No, Inklings, that’s not where Doc saw his first pictures of naked women.)
For decades, National Geographic shied away from what we might call international issues of environmentalism, poverty, and war. Those inhibitions have disappeared. What “secret” strategies allow National Geographic to connect with American readers in ways that most newspapers don’t or won’t? Those “secrets” are revealed in a review of any issue:
• The best color photography in the world, magnificently re-produced.
• Fantastic maps and graphic illustrations.
• Fine explanatory writing.
• A rich mixture of long and short forms.
• A sense that the writer or photographer is an adventurer who works for us, the reader, bringing back treasures of insight, image, or knowledge.
• A sense of audience that is pitched at different levels, from the veteran globe trotter to the fifth-grader working on a class project.
• A harmonic convergence of the “exotic other” with a sense of our “common humanity.”
So there it is, newspaper editors, a blueprint for success. Oh, Doc forgot. You closed all those foreign bureaus.
