There’s no arguing that the English-language world sets the agenda in most of the western world when it comes to discussing “new media”. Nothing wrong with this since somebody has to set the agenda, it’s a natural thing.
The only problem is that everybody – and by this I mean both English and non-English speakers – ends up talking about the latest tweak in the New York Times or Jeff Jarvis’ last idea or Cyberjournalist’s most recent post and, by the end of the day, the trackback-driven echo is so loud that the Spanish or Portuguese online world wind-up speaking more about what’s going on in English than in their own languages, and I bet the same goes on in other languages.
Now, it’s fine to write and read about about the ailing US newspaper industry and convergence in this or that British paper, and there is a lot we can all learn from these experiences. However, things are also quite different in many countries. Papers are smaller, fact-checking is laxer and bad salaries are far more common in Argentina, to take one example, than in the US or the UK, so that is not the top issue on our minds.
A second problem with this scenario where we all leach our info off the English-language blogosphere is that the online world in English is strikingly insular when it comes to language. When was the last time any leading blogger or site commented on innovations or trends in non-English speaking online media? (The Editor’s Weblog does not count).
This is not entirely the fault of those English speakers. I am sure Andy Dickenson, Jemima Kiss, Martin Stabe and others would be more than happy to bookmark and write about Soitu.es and other Spanish-language media. It’s just that language barriers are too difficult to overcome. The best way out is for those of us who can muster half-decent English to start talking about what others are unable to.
This leads to a final issue: Does our side of the world have anything interesting to offer English speakers? Isn’t the gap between the leading media in English and it’s counterpart in Spanish too big to even compare one and the other? Yes and no.
As I said a few days ago, there are many aspects in which the online media in Spanish lags well behind the media in English for the simple reason that the later is among the best in the world (I say “among”, because I’m guessing that the Japanese and Korean markets must have some great stuff too). But the Spanish-language media has several interesting things to offer, and several talking points from where to comment and analyse what’s going on, ranging from El Comercio’s Drupal-based CMS and its Star Wars interactive graphic (one of the best I saw, anywhere) to Soitu and the experience of El Tiempo’s API competition.
