Anthere wrote:
A couple of times, I tried to insist a little bit, trying to explain how our project international was, and how reducing it was to only talk to only one of our local community, while so many editors are able to speak enough english to be understood (I am not too good and I guess I would not be very understandable on a radio stuff, but others non-english do really have high quality language, and these guys were recommanded... but not contacted). I regret to say that the answer I generally got was "yes, but talking of the other languages do not interest our audience".
What would you answer to that ?
I agree completely that it's a problem. I think you're experiencing a part of the larger evolution of traditional journalism into corporate propaganda, another vicious circle that I imagine will end up with the disappearance of much of journalism as we know it today, as people gradually stop paying attention to it. I don't think it's a coincidence that WP's "in the news" area got so strong that it was able to spin off its own project; there are all kinds of experiments with alternate channels for information right now, much of it motivated by dissatisfaction with the sad state of news handling.
One of the big trends these days is "targeted marketing". In other words, instead of trying to interest a Bush-voting French-hating Houston suburbanite in WP's multilingualism, a very tough sell, go through a channel that gets to an architecture student about to spend a year of study in Paris, or an advertising agency contracted to pitch Las Vegas tourism in Malaysia. There are lots of English speakers deeply interested in the non-English-speaking world, the trick is to find them. I don't know the details myself, but media and marketing pros know all about that - it could be as simple as an email announcement to the right mailing list, or an article in a special-interest magazine.
While it's very exciting and flattering to give interviews to mainstream media, I think you have to go in with pretty low expectations these days.
Stan