I may be mistaken here, but isn't it the case that the US newspaper industry is run on far more local terms, in that there isn't such a thing as a national one? That could impact the relative value given international news.
Among the major U.S. dailies, only the New York
Times and the Wall Street
Journal genuinely qualify as national newspapers. Both, perhaps not coincidentally, have successfully made the transition from paper to electronic subscription models. Both also have strong traditions of scrupulously trying to maintain the objectivity of their reporting staffs, and enforcing a strict separation between their news and opinion operations. The Washington
Post has long had aspirations to become a national newspaper, but its readership remains primarily regional—Washington, D.C., and the areas of Maryland and Virginia surrounding the national capital. I also detect a tendency for reporters' or editors' opinions to leak into the
Post's news coverage. It's not blatant, but you probably would never need to read any of the opinion columns to guess that the paper's outlook was a "liberal" one.
The
Journal and the
Post offer more extensive international coverage than most big-city dailies in the United States. Their foreign reporting is quite good, but except for events of worldwide significance it tends to be targeted to the interests of their respective readerships (business executives for the
Journal and people with an interest in politics and government for the
Post). The
Times invests considerable resources into covering foreign regional and country-specific events in addition to major worldwide stories. Its international coverage has become significantly more sophisticated during the last ten years with the hiring of an increasing number of reporters (both as staff members and contract "stringers") who are natives of the countries they are assigned to. They still have to meet the
Times's rigorous editorial standards, but their ability to understand the cultural and political nuances of events routinely gives the paper's international stories a depth that I have rarely seen matched by other U.S. newspapers—or, frankly, by the English-language newspapers from other countries with which I am familiar.
