Aspiring to a global audience requires technology by which the network can reach a global audience. But audiences have to be attracted. The technology is not enough. A sense of the news that a global audience will find attractive is required for a successful attempt to build a global audience. The focus of the news must be a focus that will attract a global audience.

In this section we examine the news focus of WorldView and World News in two ways. One is a simple counting procedure. How many of the stories are local in focus? How many are global in focus? The counts of the stories of the two networks are compared to counts of news stories in CNN's Headline News, which has a more local focus.

The second analysis examines where the network can go for stories and how they manage that. For example, when NATO began bombing Yugoslavia one of the first acts of the Yugoslavian government was tossing all of the foreign journalists out of the country. WorldView wanted back in so they could broadcast to an audience that they understood to want to know what was going on in Yugoslavia. What is required of a news network to be permitted into countries that otherwise do not permit a free press is the second aspect of a global focus that we examine.

Counting

The Queen Mother of England died in April, 2002. For BBC's World News the stories about the death and burial were local news. For CNN's Headline News the stories about the Queen Mother were global news. The New Hampshire primary was held in January, 2000. CNN's WorldView took two days 'out;' they devoted the entire news broadcast to the primary. That was local news. If World News had carried stories about the primary those would have been global news stories.

In this strategy of counting a story is local if it involves only the country in which the network is located. News about England is local to BBC and global to CNN. News about the U.S. is local to CNN and global to BBC. Usually this distinction is easy to make. When NATO began bombing Yugoslavia that was global news -- whoever carried it. It was even global news for the Yugoslav media -- by this strategy of counting -- since it involved a number of nations. While the death of the Queen Mother and who wins the Democratic or Republican primary may be of interest to viewers in other countries and who wins the primaries will eventually have an impact on events around the world, we believe that generally people would characterize these as local/national events. It is 'what people would generally characterize' that we are attempting to build into our counts. We also assume a national location of the networks. One can imagine a future in which national location will not be terribly important, but we do not believe that the world of news broadcasting has reached that state, yet.

There are also rather arbitrary distinctions to be made. For example, how should stories about the stock market be counted? The U.S. stock market is global; it is not available only to U.S. investors. Our decision was to count as global any story about the stock market that mentioned stock markets around the world -- Europe and Asia as well as the U.S. And we counted as local any story broadcast by a CNN network that only mentioned the U.S. stock market. If BBC's World News had a story solely about the U.S. stock market that would have been global news, for them. The entertainment industry presents much of the same problem. Fortunately, neither WorldView nor World News was big on entertainment news.

'Story' is not an unproblematic category. In paper publishing there is normally a sharp boundary between one story and another in the layout of the paper. That is less true for television news. The segments flow into each other making division into stories more a matter of judgment. Our judgment was to use subject -- broadly defined -- as the principle of division rather than the television version of layout. World News devoted approximately 10 minutes an evening to Israel, Palestine, Middle Eastern nations, the U.S., European nations, and the United Nations after the Israeli invasion of Palestine in March and April of 2002. That ten minutes could have been divided into multiple stories. There were multiple locations, multiple reporters, multiple speakers, multiple focii. But we counted it as one story, a very long story by television news standards. The same was true when Iraq, the U.N., the U.S., England, Russia, and others were arguing about U.N. inspectors in Iraq. You had the same multiple locations, multiple reporters, multiple speakers, and multiple focii, but we also counted those as one story. Unless there was a break in sequence -- such as a story about the Israeli invasion early in the broadcast, stories about other subjects, and a return to the Israeli invasion -- there would be only one story about a subject, as we specify it, in any given broadcast. Since broadcasts are fixed in time, when stories get longer there are fewer stories.

Eventually there will be more than four years of counts; the four years of stories are recorded, which is roughly 10,000 stories. We are waiting on some computer programs that will let us fit a timeline to the video and let us attach meta data to that timeline. Until the program is available we have to count by hand, and 10,000 stories is well beyond what we can do with hand counts. We have counts for very brief periods of time. The stories of WorldView are from January, 2000. The stories of World News are from February and April in 2002. The stories of Headline News are from April, 2002. The only reason for taking these counts seriously is that the similarities and differences are quite striking. We will surely have to refine what we say here when the full data is available, but, based on observing the full four years, it is likely to be refinement rather than different conclusions.

The Focus of the News

What kind of stories do networks that aspire to a global audience produce?

The three broadcasts are approximately the same length. World News is about two minutes shorter than the other two. Comparing raw counts from the three broadcasts is appropriate as long as you make allowance for the slightly briefer World News.

WorldView and World News are remarkably alike. They have almost the same number of stories per day. They have almost the same number of global stories per day, and the percentage of stories that are global in focus is almost the same.

The contrast with Headline News is sharp. Headline News advertises itself as real news, real fast. Stories go by very quickly on Headline news; there are 22 stories in about 24 minutes. And the percentage of the stories that are global is only 41 percent. More than half of their stories are local, U.S. stories.

WorldView and World News aspire to a global audience [Flournoy and Stewart, 1997; Kung-Shankleman, 2000], and their choice of stories reflects that. They give viewers the news of the world. They are able to devote more time than Headline News does to each story. It is a bit implausible to characterize stories that are two minutes long, on average, as in depth. But they are able to shift their focus when there is news that they want to cover in more depth. WorldView did that in January, 2000 by completely eliminating global news to cover the New Hampshire primary. World News devoted almost half of their broadcast time to the Israel-Palestine story during late March and early April of 2002.

We have and will continue to analyze the stories that the two networks broadcast. For this piece, the analysis is designed to show that two networks that are quite different in their origins, history, and culture [Kung-Shankleman] will become much alike when trying to appeal to a global audience. They are certainly much alike in these counts.

Flournoy, Don M. and Robert K. Stewart [1997] CNN Making News in the Global Market, University of Luton Press.

Kung-Shankleman, Lucy [2000] Inside the BBC and CNN; Managing Media Organizations, Routledge.