image courtesy of clker.com

This week I’m talking international news. Finding news stories written from another cultural perspective is not an easy task in mainstream media. Generally, cultural blinkers are put on all international news. I’m not saying this is good or bad, it’s just the default setting.

This is where blogs have found a hungry audience. The Internet provides an international platform for news and stories to be told from one side of the world to the other. If you know where to look.

Global Voices online is one service that attempts to guide blog readers towards the best posts daily, from all over the world.

It operates in many languages and has experts who nominate good blogs from their countries everyday. The website aims to address the information overload (discussed in my last post,) by separating the worthy blog reads from the cyber rubbish.

Even youtube is embracing the rise of news postings on the internet. Laura Oliver wrote on journalism.co.uk about the new youtube reporter channel involving both ametuer and professional journalists.

She went as far as to say the channel could ‘provide a collaborative solution to the decline in traditional foreign correspondents’.

The internet is slowly changing the meaning of international news. It allows more people from more backgrounds to contribute to discussions on important issues. The cultural blinkers are starting to fall away.