International news is a term in journalism that refers to any news story about an event or situation occurring outside of the domestic country of the journalistic outlet. International news can be a part of a domestic news organization’s overall news coverage or it may be a distinct branch, sometimes known as foreign news, that covers news stories about countries and global subjects that are sent from abroad by news agencies, or more recently, through distance communication technologies like the internet.
Scholars have identified a number of determinants that influence what is considered to be an important enough subject matter to merit the space and attention of international news in a given media product. One of these determinants is relevance, whereby developments that are deemed to be of interest to the audience of a given media outlet tend to receive more attention. Another determinant is magnitude, whereby developments that affect a large number of people (e.g., a disaster) or impact a small number of people in an extraordinary way (e.g., a high-profile political scandal) are typically seen as more newsworthy.
A further determinant is what scholars call the ‘localization of globalization’ whereby certain places and issues tend to receive more or less attention than others do. For example, scholars have pointed out that a great deal of the world’s international news coverage tends to focus on global powers, with developing countries getting significantly less coverage. This can contribute to stereotypes about supposedly backwards or technologically illiterate global populations that are unhelpful at best and downright harmful at worst. In many cases, these factors combine to create a situation where the spotlight on a particular region in the world can result in hasty and ill-considered calls for governmental intervention that can have lasting negative impacts on those regions and their broader international relations.
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