BBC News from Elsewhere: A global search for oddball insights
Cassandra Cavallaro
is a journalist with BBC Monitoring and BBC News Magazine
The world is full of curious stories and BBC Monitoring sees lots of them, day in, day-out.
Watching the world's media often involves covering the latest terrorist attack or corruption scandal, but it also means spotting stories like the one about the Icelandic brewery that makes whale testicle beer.
Until a couple of years ago those slightly oddball tales were just an enjoyable bonus to Monitoring's work. But since 2013 they've been gathered together and published on the News from Elsewhere blog, in partnership with the BBC News Magazine.
Its aim is to highlight stories that haven't already been reported in mainstream Western media, and which audiences wouldn’t otherwise hear about. The blog relies on the expertise of Monitoring colleagues based in Reading and our international offices who send in media reports they've spotted from around the globe - often from news websites but also television reports or social media trends.
Selecting which stories make the cut is the job of the blog editor, and striking the right tone is the tricky part. Strong News from Elsewhere stories surprise or intrigue readers, but ideally they also give an insight into the country in question, because that's Monitoring's real strength. The stories will often be amusing and extremely shareable; almost all animal stories fall into this category. The tale of a stray Russian cat which feasted on $1,000-worth of fish in a deli counter was retweeted nearly 800 times.
There's a lot to be said for an underdog (or cat) story. But others aren't funny at all and serve more to highlight an aspect of life in a particular country. A report on young survivors of the 1995 Kobe earthquake celebrating their coming-of-age was poignant but hadn't made it into any Western news outlets. We added some context about Japanese traditions and the aftermath of the quake and it became a well-rounded News from Elsewhere piece.
Ensuring a variety of stories, both in terms of geography and topic, is essential and whenever possible we do stories from lesser-covered regions. If you can hit upon an engaging story from a place that almost never makes the news, that's News from Elsewhere gold dust: the sea turning red in Tonga, for example, or activists blocking parking spaces with wheelchairs in Tbilisi.
While the blog is based on media reports, we do our utmost to ensure stories are credible and spend time tracing them back to the original source. Sometimes the media coverage itself is of interest, particularly if images have been manipulated. This is where the involvement of Monitoring's regional experts is essential. - nobody knows the media landscape better and they can track down everything from video footage to social media comments to help verify and flesh out a story.
You can sometimes tell a story will do well. A Turkish company accidentally using an image of 9/11 ‘mastermind’ Khalid Sheikh Mohammed in a hair removal ad was extremely popular, helped by the fact that they’d used such an infamous photo. Similarly, when a singing Italian nun decided to release ‘Like a Virgin’ as her debut single, it was a match made in News from Elsewhere heaven.
The audience response has been positive and our readership has held steady even over traditionally quiet periods like Christmas, which is heartening. We've also seen News from Elsewhere stories picked up by other outlets. A story about the Greek-American singer Yanni planning concerts in Iran was written up by the Washington Post, and both the Independent and Quartz followed up on a Russian website’s ‘good news day’.
Within the BBC, News from Elsewhere stories have been translated by language services including BBC Ukrainian, BBC Hindi and BBC Urdu, and the World Service Outside Source programme covered our story about an Italian mayor inviting his town over for breakfast.
News from Elsewhere aims to show a different, more colourful side to international news, beyond those big stories which always dominate the headlines. It helps bring the world, with all its curiosities and quirks, a little closer to our audiences.
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