If you’re the type of person who skips past the international section in the newspaper because it just isn’t relevant to you, maybe you should have a look at Latitude News.

The fledgling operation, which was launched in November, doesn’t look particularly different from any news site on the Web at first glance. The intriguing philosophy that underlies it, however, says a lot about how the Internet has crafted a global village.

Latitude News’ focus is mainly on international events, but it approaches them with an eye toward the U.S. audience. A piece on the recovering business climate in Poland is framed in terms of the reverse diaspora it has sparked among Poles in the U.S., who are now returning home in droves. It was one of the few outlets to report on Brazilian aerospace company Embraer’s entry into the U.S. market for what has historically been an American stronghold: corporate jets.

These kinds of stories might have run in any U.S. newspaper, but Latitude news founder Maria Balinska wants them to be a staple of a new service that takes a novel look at international events.

“There are lots of people in the U.S. for whom it’s not a stretch to go to the BBC or The Guardian,” she said in an interview. “What’s missing is a bridge between their experiences and what those outlets are reporting on.”

In other words, one of the reasons most Americans care so little about overseas news is that they see no relevance to their own lives. The mission of Latitude News is to find those threads and draw them out so that Americans can understand how international events affect them. “People are put off by things that seem very far away,” she said. “Our view is that if there isn’t a local angle, we shouldn’t do it.”

Globe Trotter

The idea for Latitude News sprang from Balinska’s multi-cultural childhood and peripatetic career as a journalist working in Europe. She had lived in five countries and attended 10 schools by the age of 18. As a journalist working on the European continent and for the BBC she became fascinated with the international stories that captured the attention of British readers. “People were very interested in individual storytelling and in comparisons,” she said. “They wanted to understand what they could learn from the French health system or what mountains of garbage in Germany meant to them.” She explains some of the research and thinking that led to Latitude News here.

Balinska returned to the U.S. on a Nieman Fellowship two years ago and took advantage of an International Women’s Media Foundation grant to get the venture off the ground. She’s been able to hire a small full-time staff and has some freelance dollars to spend. “We’re looking for people who have a global perspective but who can scratch the surface of American communities and find links and parallels,” she said.

Storytelling is a core feature of the service. In contrast to the often detached perspective readers see in international news coverage, Latitude News strives to find people whose experiences illustrate the local impact of faraway events.

For example, the staff is currently trying to reach victims of the Syrian diaspora who have fled to the U.S. to see if activists living here may later emerge as leaders back in Syria. A story on the Greek debt crisis  is told from the perspective of three Greek citizens who are learning to cope with an economy in a tailspin.

Balinska won’t say how much funding the venture has raised or when it will become self-sustaining. The site is still rough around the edges (clicking on one of the featured stories on the home page today returned a 404 error) and working on a unique voice, but it’s yet another example of how journalists are stepping in to fill the vacuum left by traditional news organizations with innovative experiments.

We would have thought that the devastation of mainstream media in general – and the newspaper industry in particular – would confer some humility on daily newspaper editors. Then we read a story like this one.

To summarize: A man in his 40s who has lived a mostly trouble-free life with his wife and children picks up the newspaper one day to find his photo on the front page next to a story about a child rapist who happens to have the same name. It appears the newspaper had used a file photo taken 11 months earlier without making much effort to check that the person in the photo was the same as the person who had been indicted. Both men are named Angel Ortiz, a Spanish name that’s about as common as Nick Jones in the English-speaking world. Furthermore, no one at the newspaper appeared to notice that the Ortiz who had been charged with rape is in his 20s while the Ortiz in the photo is in his 40s.

That’s bad enough, but what really angered us was this passage:

[Ortiz lawyer David] Rich said he wrote a letter to The MetroWest Daily News Editor Richard Lodge on Dec. 16, demanding a front page retraction. Lodge responded the paper would run something the next day, Saturday, Dec. 17, according to Rich, and he told Rich the photo was  “immediately removed the photo from the website,” upon receipt of the letter.

“The retraction ran on the bottom of page 2, with no photo,” said Rich…Ortiz never received a personal letter of apology from anyone at the daily newspaper, added Rich.

According to Rich, Ortiz lost his job after the story appeared and has been unable to find employment. He hides in his house for fear that he will be assaulted if recognized in public. He’s living in hell thanks to a mistake that could have been easily avoided with a look into the archives or an address check.

In our view, a front-page retraction and apology would be the least the paper could do to help put this guy’s life back in order. But they didn’t even send a letter.

What do you think the editors should have done?

Tablet computers have been hailed as the salvation of the newspaper industry, but most publishers are squandering the opportunity, writes Newsosaur Alan Mutter in a searing sendup of newspaper tablet apps on Editor & Publisher.

“In contrast to the crisp, graphically engaging and highly interactive apps flooding the Apple store, the typical newspaper site is filled with gray, meandering columns of text requiring multiple swipes to get to the bottom of the page. That is to say: Newspapers don’t come close to leveraging the power of this new medium,” Mutter writes, pointing to products from the San Francisco Chronicle, Philadelphia Inquirer and even The New York Times as examples.

Many publishers are opting to use the native tablet browser to deliver content rather than customizing the experience for the device, and some are simply delivering PDF versions of their print products, Mutter says. This laziness is particularly alarming in light of the fact that people who consume information on tablets are among the most desirable prospects for paid circulation and advertising. The Newsosaur believes once they get a load of the visually rich and interactive offerings from magazine and broadcast competitors they’ll never come back to the digital broadsheets being offered by the dailies.

Although we own a tablet, we’ll admit we haven’t spent much time surveying the landscape of news apps. RSS feeds do the job just fine for us. However, if Mutter’s critique is on the mark, this is a head-slappingly stupid mistake on the part of publishers, who finally have a platform that at least some people are willing to pay for. Anyone who has worked in both print and digital media will tell you that the design and presentation skills that work in one format fail badly in the other. The worst mistake a print publisher can make is to put print designers in charge of online look and feel. It’s even worse on tablets, where apps offer a whole new level of interactivity. This is software, not ink on dead trees.

NYT Co. Takes Earnings Hit

Now the sobering news about The New York Times. Coming off a promising third quarter in which the company reported strong growth in subscriptions to its digital editions, parent New York Times Co. reported a $40 million loss in the fourth quarter on an 8% decline in print advertising. The paper’s paywall continues to thrive, and digital advertising revenue was up 5% in the quarter. However, the success online can’t make up for the continued free-fall in the much more profitable print advertising business.

The collapse of that revenue stream was dramatized by blogger Paul McMorrow, who came up with the chart at right. We can’t vouch for the accuracy of the numbers, but the choice of scale demonstrates clearly the industry’s dilemma. Digital revenue is nowhere close to making up for the decline in print.

The Times Co. was also hurt by a dramatic drop in the performance of About.com, the online encyclopedia/how-to engine it acquired for $410 million 2005. About.com was victimized by recent changes to Google’s search algorithms that penalized so-called “content farms” like Demand Media, which pay freelancers pennies to produce crap in the name of driving search traffic. About.com used to top Google search results for a lot of popular consumer queries, but no more. Profits at the site dropped 67% in the quarter on a 25% revenue decline.

 Miscellany

Social media is beginning to cover itself. Social blogging site Tumblr, which hosts more than 42 million blogs, will hire two professional editors to write about what’s going on on Tumblr. The thinking is that a community with that many members must generate a lot of content all by itself. Twitter and Facebook have both recently hired journalists to write about what’s hot in those communities.

Speaking of Facebook, if you’re trying to improve your presence there, take a few tips from Entrepreneur magazine. Starr Hall’s advice includes naming your page appropriately and greeting visitors with a “welcome” page rather than the Facebook wall. And have you heard about the new subscribe feature that lets people follow your public updates without friending you? Read more about that. We also recommend these tips for small businesses and these tips for slightly larger businesses, perhaps because we wrote them. The key to success on the world’s largest social network is engagement, not publishing. Ask questions, prompt response, provoke and amuse. Our vote for the most awesome Facebook page: Skittles. Unique voice and dripping with personality. “Skittles now has 20 million fans? If I had that many guinea pigs, I’d be unstoppable.”