The editor of The Christian Science Monitor, a great Boston institution, moves to Berlin.

[Nittersing]

"By the time some of you read this, I will be living in Berlin.

No, I am not part of some editor exchange program. You should not expect the chief of the Süddeutsche Zeitung to announce a seven-part series on Oktoberfest in the next edition of the Weekly. This is about my family – the fact that I am the only member without German citizenship, and yet we have never lived in Germany. It was time to do that before my kids are no longer kids (which will be shockingly soon).

Yet the fact that the editor of The Christian Science Monitor will live in Germany for a year does say something about this news organization and what it values.

Not far from the Monitor offices is the headquarters of The Boston Globe – a publication with equally proud Boston roots. Today, the Globe has not a single foreign correspondent. This is not schadenfreude, to use a delightful German term. Rather, the Globe made an eminently logical decision. Generally speaking, international news doesn’t sell in the United States. And it is fantastically expensive, to boot – a problematic combination, even for those committed to it."

https://www.csmonitor.com/Commentary/From-the-Editors/2023/0724/Boston-to-Berlin

[flying_wahini]

1. I would leave too, if I could.

[Hortensis]

2. :) "Qualities like compassion, respect, generosity, and honesty know no borders"

What does the Monitor do better than every other news organization on the planet? I would argue that it offers a transformative view of the world itself – that the human story is more interconnected and more hopeful than much media coverage would have us believe.

The Monitor can’t not cover the world. To focus only on the United States – or any other country – would be to misapply its mission. Qualities like compassion, respect, generosity, and honesty know no borders, and to understand how they shape the human experience requires chronicling how the struggle over them is convulsing the world. That is what news is.

His children and family are fortunate. Enjoy!

[Celerity]

3. 'Generally speaking, international news doesn't sell in the United States.'

One of the most dismaying things I encountered when I moved back to (I was born there but left as a small child) Los Angeles from London in the mid-2010s for my MBA studies was the pretty much tragicomical lack of knowledge about non-US current affairs (let alone history) emanating from the majority of Americans I interacted with. And that was in supposedly uber-cosmopolitan LA, not some rural, ruby red provincial shithole infused with a self-perpetuating hatred of 'foreigners', 'big city libruls', and fancy book learnin'.