Anglophone emergency

This blog usually has fun decoding the confusions of agenda and language that international anglophone news throws up – human “coyotes”, angry cassowaries chasing “blokes”, and so on. But this ambiguity is potentially more serious.

This summer, the US launched a new suicide prevention hotline number, 988. There have recently been technical problems with it that forced it offline for a period. For some reason in the past few days – perhaps as a result of this news – some British Twitter users started copy-pasting and retweeting boilerplate text to raise awareness of the number as if it were a service in the UK, even though, of course, it isn’t, and that number here connects to nothing.

988 is a new phone number that has gone live in the UK to help people in a mental health crisis. The line is dedicated for anyone in need of mental health assistance of any kind
please share #MentalHealthMatters #MentalHealthAwareness

— Thom Donnelly 🎭🎬 (@ThomJaymes) December 4, 2022

The confusion does seem to have spread,

It's alarming to see misinformation of that 988 number spread

As if a new UK suicide hotline was launched with zero pr/media coverage

Before sharing you should ask…

☑️Where has this information came from?

☑️How can I verify it's true

☑️How do I know it's factual

— Victoria Heaney (@Vvfabs) December 4, 2022

and to have reached the point where where Mind, the prominent British mental health charity, was deploying its social media team to refute it:

Hi Heather, 988 is America's mental health crisis hotline number, not UK. ^Eli

— Mind (@MindCharity) December 5, 2022

Now Joe McNally at Horny Handed Subs of Toil suggests that a news story on the Independent website in the UK about 988’s technical problems may have fuelled some of the confusion.

The Independent is not one of the British news organisations determined to break into the US market – it’s UK-focused – and yet this story that it published last week seems to be a straight Associated Press wire story for an American audience. The headline, the opening paragraphs and even the photo are identical to the original version on the AP site.

As McNally says in his post, “for obvious reasons, sharing false information about emergency mental health services has enormous potential to cause serious harm”. And he rightly points out that here,

“nobody thought to make it clear at any point in the copy that this is an American story. It mentions a US health agency and a US health official but it’s full of references to ‘national’ services and ‘the nation’ without ever once explicitly stating *what that nation is*”.

He also says that several British people linked to this article to defend the information they had shared, because it’s so ambiguous about location. Arriving at the story almost 48 hours late, and with the rebuttal effort in full swing, I can’t now find any tweets that explicitly do this (although it may have happened on other social media). But even without a social media kerfuffle, the potential for this article to confuse, when presented on a UK site without any context, is clear. (Look at the bald headline in the screenshot above, on a site belonging to a British newspaper with not much of an international profile. Where would you conclude this hotline service might be based?)

As you read it closely, you see clues: 911, which is mentioned as “the emergency line”, is of course not the UK’s emergency line. Britain has no “Department of Health and Human Services”. The number was out of service “for several hours Thursday”, not “several hours on Thursday”. “Counselors” is given with one L, not two. But these are things that an editor would notice, not necessarily a member of the public.

At the Tribune, we have a lookup table for crisis hotline numbers in our three markets – the UK, the US and Australia – and add them as footnotes to relevant stories according to which audience the piece is intended for. In the UK, the number we give is 116 123, for the Samaritans. But as we have discussed many times on the blog, content intended for one market has a way of leaking across the website and being found by readers abroad.

That’s why the Tribune’s audience and SEO team, despite their rapacious appetite for clicks and sensation, still insist on us making clear in every headline or standfirst which country the news we report is taking place in. A footnote at the end is all very well, but the word “American” in the Independent’s standfirst here would have killed off the confusion at source.

Observing from outside, the article gives every impression of having been auto-launched without editorial intervention. However, if you read it word for word against the version on the AP site, there are some differences. This paragraph appears in the AP version but not in the Indy version,

“Veterans who are looking to reach the helpline can call the Veterans Crisis Line directly at 877-267-6030. The outage is also affecting the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration’s Disaster Distress Helpline.”

and this additional information appears at the end of the agency’s version too:

“In a statement on its website, the company said it is ‘experiencing an incident that is impacting production across numerous systems’ and is ‘working diligently to restore service.’”

It’s not entirely clear why this is so. If these are the interventions of an editor at the Indy, then it’s worrying that they made those emendations but not others that would have clarified the story fully. (Also, why would anyone delete the contractor’s statement at the end?) It is perhaps more likely that these are additions from a later write-through by AP reporters, and that the Indy fetched the story for its site before they were filed; obviously the AP’s own site will always have the fullest, latest version.

If the latter is the case, then the article would indeed seem to have published with minimal human intervention, which calls to mind the complaint voiced for years by the old Testy Copy Editors website: “Hundreds of newspapers run AP completely unedited!” If that was a problem in the old days of American print, then it must be even more so now that hundreds of websites – and not all of them in the US – are running AP unedited too.

h/t: Joe McNally

Two degrees of separation

These temperature conversions are totally correct (unlike the ones we were discussing in August): the interesting about them, for keen students of anglosphere media, is not their inaccuracy, but their telltale quality.

The Paris climate convention settled for nice round numbers for obvious reasons – clarity and memorability – when setting its target global warming limits. But it settled for them in Celsius. So in a major anglophone news market with exclusively imperial measurements – in other words, of course, the US – 2C and 1.5C become a much less catchy 3.6F and 2.7F. And for those with a practised eye, seeing them thus in a headline on the Mail website instantly identifies this global-interest piece’s country of origin, as surely as that parade of suspiciously Australian experts discussing heat deaths did last year.

Further down the article, we encounter a few more classic anglosphere problems: the text is resolutely in F, but the appended graphic is resolutely in C,

and whereas the main text has been converting from imperial to metric, the explainer box converts from metric to imperial,

giving the whole ensemble a “product of more than one country” feel.

This is not too difficult in mixed-measurements Britain, where, as we have observed before, we drive by the mile but refuel by the litre, and are fairly agile at switching between the two standards. But in countries where one system predominates, it must feel more alienating when the subject you are reporting about uses non-domestic measurements, especially if the conversions prove infelicitous, or even impossible.

Take – for a very random, recently encountered example – Belgian coverage of the NFL. In Le Soir, the report of this year’s Super Bowl (“un thriller hollywoodien”) by the news agency Belga does not even attempt to translate many of the sport’s terms, and certainly tries nothing so foolish as to introduce the idea of metres to the concept of down and distance.

Here it simply talks of “70 yards” (not even 70 “verges”, which might be one direct translation of the imperial measurement), just as “touchdowns” are that in French too (and even “drives”, albeit in neologism quotes).

Pleasingly, however, the report does use “saquer”, a verb meaning to fire, dismiss or mark someone down, for quarterback sacks. And for a conversion that’s actually better than the original, I love the phrase “passe ‘hallelujah'” for a long throw. Sounds even more exciting than a Hail Mary pass, and it only happened at the start of the second half.

Animal instincts

Shot at by coyotes? As if those wild desert canines weren’t ugly enough already. How do they manage to pull the triggers?

Hang on, though – look at that capitalisation. The Mail’s ear for emphasis, unlike some of its tabloid rivals, is unerring, and if it thinks being shot at is the biggest thing in the headline – not “shot at BY COYOTES” – then all may not be as it seems. In fact, it emerges after you click on the link that the “coyotes” here are human: it’s an American term for the people-smugglers who operate on the US-Mexican border, as the standfirst begins to make clear.

It’s another classic anglosphere news moment – a usage completely unfamiliar in Britain finding its way straight on to the UK homepage via the New York newsroom (just as, at the time of writing, readers of the American homepage are being informed of a former British soap actress’s new hobby of pole dancing, no doubt with a mixture of intrigue and bafflement as to who she is).

Even on the Mail website, though, coyote in this sense is quite rare – a comparative Google search suggests that only about 1,100 articles using the word also contain the word “smuggler”, compared with the 10,000-plus pieces about actual coyotes, the cast of Coyote Ugly, coywolves (coyote-wolf hybrids) and even zombie coyotes (no, really! Well, OK, they’re unwell and prowling around during the day).

It would be interesting to know just how well understood that usage is even in the US away from the southern border states – especially since, a few years ago, it even seemed to confuse President Trump, who spoke in a speech of the need for a border wall to deter “chaos, crime, cartels and, believe it or not, coyotes”.

You’d have thought that “chaos, crime and cartels” would have adequately covered the activities of the human type of coyote without … ? Anyway, never mind. Although given that canine coyotes were already widespread across western north America at the time of European colonisation, a wall would only serve to keep them in, rather than out.

Glossed in translation

At the anglosphere-girdling modern Tribune, as regular readers know, the Australian reporters write Australian and the American reporters write American, and we don’t enforce British English anywhere except Britain. But there is one partial exception to this rule and that is for the original Tribune – the print Tribune.

The newspaper takes in reports from all three newsrooms but is only distributed in Britain, and so what was initially written for the understanding of customers in Melbourne or Pittsburgh can subsequently find itself in front of a completely different audience. And if you’re editing it for print, for an entirely British audience, you do have to intervene and translate – sometimes quite intensively.

Take, for example, this piece, filed online in Australia for Australians, and then sent through as-is for print in the UK:

Putting oneself in the place of a British reader, one might find oneself asking:

• Who?

• What’s that?

• What were they?

• Where?

Scott Morrison needs no introduction at all to Australians, but British audiences may need a gentle reminder of who he is. “Federal parliament” is a significant distinction to make in a country that also has state parliaments, but the distinction is probably unnecessary for overseas readers, who will be working on the assumption that only controversies at national level will be making the foreign pages. The five secret self-appointments were the talk of the country at the time, but presenting them like this – in a brief, second-news-cycle way, for people already closely informed – doesn’t sit entirely well 10,000 miles away, where readers may have missed the story. And Cook here is “the Division of Cook”, that is to say Morrison’s parliamentary constituency in Sydney – not a name that will resonate at all with Britons.

So after some British-ising, you might end up with something like this:

I’m not sure if there are any “rules” to this yet, but a few principles, as illustrated above, often seem to apply:

(1) Anything that is too obvious to mention for the piece’s original audience (eg, who Scott Morrison is), may need explicitly putting in.

(2) Any detail obscure enough that even the home audience needs to be reminded of it (for example, the name of Morrison’s seat) may need taking out, simply on the grounds that it’s too much information for an audience already processing a lot of unfamiliarity.

(3) If the home audience is on the second or third news cycle for the story, it may be worth re-editing to take the story back “half a cycle”, so to speak, for an overseas audience – in other words, you may not be able to rely as heavily on readers’ knowledge of prior developments as the home reporter is entitled to.

This might seem like a very traditional kind of editing – spelling things out and putting sentences into British English, damn it – but in fact it, too, is a product of the burgeoning world of anglosphere news. In the old days, when your Australian bureau filed a story, it would have been written for the desk in London, and all the glosses and explanations necessary for comprehension in Britain would have already been added. It’s only now, with unmediated copy arriving from two newsrooms with their own priorities, that the job needs to be done at home base. And at the Tribune, the task seems to have fallen to the copy desk – another small example of how much growing online news organisations need subeditors to keep things running smoothly.

Going for bloke

It’s on the Mail’s UK homepage, but there’s something very Australian about this story, isn’t there? And the most uniquely Australian thing about it is not the cassowary (which is also indigenous to Papua New Guinea): it’s the presence of the word “blokes” in the headline.

The word is rarely heard in any context in the US, of course, and in the UK, although it’s common, you would never see it in straight news reporting like this. In Britain, it carries a strong overtone of randomness or inconsequentiality – “some bloke”; “that bloke over there”. It’s almost dismissive; it would invite you not to care much about the people to whom the news had happened.

In Australia, however, it means something quite different: the “Aussie bloke” is a national idea, a recognised type, familiar from cultural exports such as Crocodile Dundee. As the academic Andrea Waling puts it, a bloke is “white, straight, able-bodied, and good for a laugh. He is practical and good in a crisis, but generally laid back. He rejects individualism in favour of loyalty to his mates.” In this context, “bloke” is not a denigration but an invitation to identify with the protagonists and sympathise. They are good sorts, Everymen, authentic Australians: people just like you or me, and just as likely to be out of their depth when being chased by a 100lb bird with a blue face.

Up until now, this blog has been discussing these constant collisions of anglosphere news dialects as a three-way “clash of equals” involving British, American and Australian English, but now I’m starting to suspect it’s even more complicated than that. For example, this piece of copy appeared in the Tribune subs’ queue a couple of weeks ago:

Because the story had arrived from the Australian website on its way to the UK print edition, it had already been edited, and there in blue (ie, already deleted) was the word “dairies”. Dairies? It seemed wrong, obviously, but also such an unlikely mistake to make in the context of cigarette retailing. What could the writer have meant?

In fact, a bit of Googling revealed that it wasn’t a mistake at all: this story was filed to the Australian newsroom by our correspondent in New Zealand, where the term for a corner shop/7-11/convenience store is, indeed, a “dairy”. But this usage is not even understood in Australia, so the sub in Sydney had changed it, hours before the copy found its way to London. I did one or two bits of de-Australianising elsewhere for UK readers, but beneath that work there had already been a process of de-New Zealandising that would have been undetectable to anyone outside the Tribune.

This prompts the thought that beneath the “big three” flavours of anglosphere news English, there is also an overshadowed hierarchy of others. At the Tribune, in addition to New Zealand correspondents filing to Sydney, Canadian reporters file to New York and South African writers to London. What is happening to idioms and expressions common in these countries and present in copy, but processed at regional offices elsewhere before being published to the world? Presumably, as in this case, they are ending up on the spike. We have previously floated the idea of British, Australian and American news eventually merging into one, but, if it ever happens, it may have to wait until six or seven flavours of English have been flattened into three.

Made in Chelsea (Vic.)

Good arvo! No, wait – wrong antipodean reference. Avo on toast? No, not that either. This AVO is another piece of uniquely Australian life that slipped through the geofence a few weeks ago and on to the Mail’s UK homepage – an Apprehended Violence Order, or restraining order, which can be applied for in alleged cases of domestic abuse. And that’s before we even contemplate “farewell” as a verb – unheard of in Britain but a common feature of southern-hemisphere English.

Two unexplained regionalisms in the same celebrity headline? It’s just another day on Planet Anglophone News. More recently, a “finance pro” – albeit this time explicitly “from Sydney” – has saved $158.55 (presumably that’s Australian dollars) with some thrifty tips.

But as you read to the bottom of the article, you come across a plain factbox, unnervingly universal in tone, suggesting you “bring your own water” to the airport. Best of luck with that in the UK and the US, where bottled drinks have been summarily removed from carry-on bags at security for the past 20 years.

Now, of course this time due notice of location has been served at the top of the article. You can’t put the word “Australia” in every paragraph, and nor should you if you’re trying to be taken seriously by an Australian audience. Nonetheless, one does flinch slightly at consumer advice that suits only one country being broadcast across two other continents.

What to do? Last week, regular reader Paul had a suggestion: “Perhaps one answer is to have datelines on every web story, as on news agency feeds,” he writes. It’s a thought: and it is something that the Mail currently succeeds at better than the Tribune. We have remarked before that the Mail’s bylines could be larger and a less pale shade of blue, but they are at least some signal of location: “Reporter X for Daily Mail Australia”, or, more gnomically for the US, “Reporter X for Dailymail.com”.

Every media organisation likes to advertise where their foreign correspondents are stationed in the byline. But the arguments against having true datelines, specific to towns and cities, on home news stories are well rehearsed in Fleet Street. National papers shouldn’t be boasting about reporting “from Doncaster”, as though wanting congratulations for catching a train to Yorkshire, and if one were to specify where every single story were written, an embarrassingly high number would be datelined “… in London”.

Also, as Paul observes, it might not always solve the anglosphere problem either: “Australian coverage, especially when place names have been transplanted from the UK, can cause initial confusion until you realise the story is about Newcastle, New South Wales and not Tyneside.” That’s true: it could also be tricky reporting from Ipswich (Queensland), Harrogate (South Australia) or Chelsea (Victoria). But, as a policy, it might be worth a try.

The three-newsroom problem

Vienna – “Austria’s capital, Vienna” – is the most liveable city in the world, and the Tribune is all over the story. Global news, global news organisation: it’s the perfect fit. Except that, no sooner have we announced the winner than, one paragraph later, we’re straight into a controversy about … Auckland.

Now, Auckland was last year’s winner by reason of its strict lockdown, and now it’s 34th for the same reason, which is interesting. OK. But two brief paragraphs about Vienna later, we move on to … Melbourne. Melbourne came tenth.

Then we address Australia’s other major cities, none of which are in the top 25. Finally, at paragraph seven, we get to a brief rundown of the six European cities in the top 10.

By paragraph 11, we’re back on the subject of Melbourne, with a quote from the premier of Victoria,

and you start to suspect that, just possibly, this global-interest story about all the world’s cities was filed by the Australian office. The byline tells you only that the article is by “Staff and agencies”,

but the dateline reveals a launch time of 2.43am, British summer time – approaching 10pm for the US office, which is day shift only, but 11.43am, right in the middle of the working day, down under.

The Tribune has three fully fledged newsrooms: London, New York and Sydney. The demerits of having a trio of autonomous operations running in parallel have been rehearsed at length in this blog, but of course there are merits as well. For instance, live blogs and big rolling stories in one country can be kept alive all night and into the morning by the other two offices; as a natural consequence of the time zones in which it operates, the Tribune never sleeps now. Quality of coverage may dip a little as, say, London reporters wrestle with the snakepit machinations of Capitol Hill, but breaking political news at 5am EDT will be up ready for a breakfast audience across the US before the baton is handed back.

In these circumstances it is instinctively understood who the story “belongs” to, and which are the senior and junior newsrooms in each case. There is also a clear, if slightly troublesome, policy about whether you should write local news chiefly for a local audience in each jurisdiction: the answer is yes, even if those stories sound a bit baffling to readers abroad. The three-newsroom problem that we do not seem to have addressed yet is what to do about stories of apparently global relevance where all the interest will in fact be local, and vary according to where it is being read.

Last year we discussed the Sydney-bureau story about heat deaths around the world in which all the experts quoted were Australian. This story has a further problem: despite introducing antipodean figures as though they were familiar names, it also tries to adopt a slightly tortured citizen-of-nowhere approach to the geography (“Switzerland’s Zurich”, “fellow Swiss city Geneva” and so on). London, the Tribune’s home and headquarters, is not mentioned until the 18th paragraph. The same is true of New York (or, as the article calls it, “the US city of New York”).

A conscious attempt at impartiality mixes with the subconscious desire to find relevance for the home market, and for two-thirds of its audience the story jars. But it’s hard to believe that writers in New York or London would, or could, have approached it any differently.

And that leaves us with a suggestion that defies efficient planning and good internet practice, but seems to make the most journalistic sense: if you have three newsrooms, are there in fact some stories that you need to cover three times?

Who, what, why, when, wherever

For a second, I thought we’d done it – I thought we’d found the first anglosphere news story that gives you no clue whatsoever about where it happened.

Comedian Celeste Barber, nationality unspecified, has made fun of influencer Adelina Lazarova, nationality unspecified, in a parody video following a storm over Barber’s mocking of model Emily Ratajkowski, nationality unspecified. And where did all this happen? That remains unspecified.

Lazarova was being mocked for backflipping out of a convertible Lamborghini in high heels on social media, and Ratajkowski was being teased over a seductive bikini videoclip, so the real answer to the question “where did this happen” is, of course, “on the internet”. Nonetheless, we have a Russian-born, Emirates-based influencer doing gymnastics (in New York, as it happens) and a British-born American model famous for her globetrotting, and finally we seem to be floating free in the borderless kingdom of online news …

Except that there are still one or two clues to bring us back to earth. That “copping” in the headline: that’s redolent of a certain southern-hemisphere flavour of English. And further down, it is reported that Barber is about to tour Australia. Why would that be of interest to anyone except people living in … ah, yes. A closer squint at the byline, in Mail Online’s pale, self-effacing font, confirms it: “By Caleb Taylor for Daily Mail Australia”. The reason that Barber’s location isn’t stated in the piece is not because it doesn’t matter any more – “hey, a story’s a story!” – but because she doesn’t need to be identified to an Australian audience. This is a case of the Mail trying to sound Australian, not trying to sound stateless.

But still, with regard to the Five W’s of reporting, this is the first anglosphere news piece I’ve seen that doesn’t make any explicit effort to answer the question “where?”. Indeed, if there hadn’t been a passing reference to Lazarova’s showing-off taking place in the US, there wouldn’t have been a geographical locator anywhere in the text. And, you might argue, in cases like this there doesn’t need to be: if the news (OK, “news”) happens on Instagram, then it happens everywhere at once. The mainstream media is hesitantly becoming stateless, expanding into markets bounded only by language, but social media doesn’t even have that constraint: you can sign up to all three protagonists’ accounts in a home-country native version of the app wherever you are. The only thing that may hold you back after that is the captions to Lazarova’s selfies, which are frequently in Cyrillic.

Subs – please check

^{HMS Ambush on sea trials. © Crown copyright 2012}

*

“We have been regularly referring to the value of the Aus-French submarine deal as $90bn,” writes an astute member of the Tribune’s night shift to colleagues. “But this is 90bn AUSTRALIAN dollars, not US dollars.”

That is an excellent point. “This makes sense for an Australian audience but is confusing for everyone else. Lots of writers and subs are referring back to Aus pieces for their info and copying this sum into stories for a US, UK and global audience. Non-Australia folk: please be on the alert for this (and for similar Australian stories of global import). Australia folk: if a story is very much global, would you consider using the notation A$? Anyway, something for discussion.”

It certainly is something for discussion: this blog has wrestled for years with the problems of anglophone news organisations trying to bestride the globe while remaining part of a national dialogue. The Aukus submarines deal, agreed between Australia, the UK and the US, looks like a perfect anglosphere news story – after all, these are the three countries where forward-looking British papers such as the Tribune now have newsrooms. But although that means the coverage has been panoramic, the small but essential details are proving as troublesome as ever.

Some newsdesks did fall into the trap. Eastern Eye converted the “$90bn” that France stands to lose from the cancellation of its own submarine deal with Australia into “£66bn”:

But that is the sterling equivalent of 90 billion US dollars, not Australian; the correct figure for A$ is about £48bn.

The Tribune does not appear to have gone that far, but by saying “$90bn” in several pieces without context we may have been giving the impression – it’s easily done – that we were speaking of the world’s reserve currency when we were not. And in this article in the Mail, focusing on the Biden angle and with a US political writer leading the bylines,

the $90bn figure also stands unqualified.*

Interestingly, the same article gives comparative costings of various submarine types further down,

and those figures are not in US dollars either. A Virginia-class boat seems to cost about US$3.4bn (which is about A$4.5bn) and a new HMS Astute would set you back about £1.4bn-£1.6bn, which is not as much as $2.6bn in US currency. It would seem that the costs in this US-focused article are being given consistently in Australian dollars, but without ever saying so.

Why would you not specify? Perhaps because, as we have discussed so often, journalists at the Tribune and similar organisations are often encouraged not to. Our purpose in expanding across the anglosphere is to provide local coverage in underserved markets, to bed in as a homegrown news source. So we write in different flavours of English depending on which continent we’re on, and speak of weights and measures as locals would. In which case, as the night sub’s email suggests, adopting international terminology for a national currency is something that very much needs to be “considered” before it is enforced. Too much globalist perspective, too much wire-service neutrality, betrays you as an outsider.

This causes a slight problem when local stories meant for one country’s consumption become visible on another country’s homepage. But it causes even greater problems when the three jurisdictions you cover collide in the same global story. Because then, whose worldview wins?

*“Advanced” warning – I know, I know.

Weather outlook

Any of the Tribune’s three world-girdling newsrooms could have produced this alarming story on heat deaths:

Some stories are local, which is why we set up English-speaking operations in the US and Australia, but some stories are global, and the climate crisis affects everyone. In the end, it was Australia who wrote up the report for all three of us, and it duly found its way into the print subs’ queue for the newspaper in London.

Which was fine, except that, in this globally relevant story, the first person quoted …

was Australian, and the second person quoted …

… was Australian, and the next part of the story …

… concerned a study in which Australia had done notably badly (whereas the UK and the US had only done moderately badly), and the broadening out of the theme …

… took us into the kind of Australian domestic shorthand that I suspect may never have been encountered in the Tribune’s home news pages before.

It’s not hard to guess what the Australian Medical Association is, but the Hesta Super Fund is more recondite: a huge pension fund of a specifically Australian type called a “super fund” that once (but no longer) restricted its membership to employees in the health service. That explanation almost leaves UK readers none the wiser than the name: It’s sort of a “health body”, but not quite, and seems to be politically engaged in a way that no major pension fund in the UK ever is. In the end, I glossed it as something like “major health-focused pension fund”, but I’m not sure that enlightened many readers on the Tube.

We have come across this problem in a minor way before, when a developing international story gets handed off between newsrooms: the weights, measures and currencies start to fluctuate, and views change about what the reader can be assumed to know. But this is a slightly bigger problem. We don’t yet have reporters with a contact book big enough to provide region-specific quotes and examples for three different continents. Nor do we have the resources (usually) to write up a story three times in all three jurisdictions. So you end up with a story flavoured with the sources, agenda and analysis of one particular newsroom, and the other two have to make do with what’s supplied.

As we have discussed more than once, the UK’s anglophone news organisations are anxious to ensure Australian readers don’t feel their domestic news has been written by outsiders. But what we haven’t considered so far is the possibility that British readers might be getting that feeling instead.