Global Reporting

World news or international news, whatever you want to call it, is the globally-wide news vocabulary for news about a specific country, an international issue or a worldwide topic. This includes everything from politics and wars to natural disasters and entertainment. The term ‘world news’ is somewhat of a misleading nickname; many news agencies and publications are actually just miniature versions of world news agencies that cover the larger, nationally-based news outlets. Thus the term may be used interchangeably with world publications such as the New York Times, CNN, Agence France-Press, and even the BBC.

While most world news agencies operate solely in English, a growing number of international news agencies are beginning to offer more sources of their work in other languages, especially French, German, Spanish, Japanese, Korean and Thai, as well as Russian. A growing number of world newspapers and television stations also report in other languages other than English, such as Chinese, Arabic, Russian, and Japanese. This growing field of global journalism is now at the forefront of the new media age, as many websites rely on stories that are translated from one language to another, with the result that much of the content is meaningless junk-mail. At best, most such websites are thinly disguised advertising for local businesses, which makes it all the more important for journalists who are reporting from foreign countries and faraway places to provide well-researched and well-reseeded reports that are up-to-date with relevant information that’s genuinely factual, rather than self-serving. It has been said that the best journalists in the world are those who report from areas where the general public doesn’t go.

Globalization of journalism has left few gaps untouched: foreign correspondents now have a global choice of where they choose to live and work, and the internet has opened up a wealth of new ways for them to get the job done, from blogging to full-fledged web writing and editing, which will only intensify their need for updated information wherever it can be found. This is why the field of global journalism is experiencing a huge boom right now. It’s a field that will expand and grow in the years to come as globalization continues to occur, as more news agencies take their work outside of traditional Western business and politics and abroad the boundaries of their own countries. The field of global journalism is at an all-time high right now, and those who understand it are going to make a lot of money in the future.