(Image: Private Media)

If you’re one of the 30% of Australians who are university graduates, there’s a global news voice coming looking for you this year out of the United States. So far there’s no name and no product — just an idea of a market gap right about where you’re standing.

A new voice. A different look at news. Sounds great. What could go wrong?

“A new, English-speaking, college-educated global audience has emerged across the globe,” said Justin Smith, CEO-to-be of the new venture. “The mobile internet and the rise of international higher education have created an English-speaking, college-educated, professional class of over 200 million people.”

Nearly 10 million of them are right here in Australia and New Zealand, likely to be an early test market — we’re eager early adopters, sufficiently alike yet just different enough.

Former editor-in-chief of BuzzFeed and planned head of news Ben Smith (no relation) oversaw the launch of one of BuzzFeed’s first non-American franchises here in Australia in 2013.  

[Insert name here] claims to be the first digital native start-up in the global news space, competing with traditional US players like The New York Times or The Washington Post, UK outlets like the BBC and The Guardian, and global financial and business news players like The Wall Street Journal, the Financial Times, The Economist and Bloomberg.com.

All have existing footprints and supporters in Australia. The Guardian launched its successful Australian edition in 2013, and the NYT opened an expanded bureau in 2017 as part of its growth to over 1 million non-US digital subscribers. The Wall Street Journal is digitally available for subscribers to The Australian (as is The Times in London), and the weekend FT regularly outsells the AFR in the wealthiest suburbs of Sydney and Melbourne.

Easy-peasy, Justin Smith says in the launch statement — legacy industry incumbents ”see the world through a domestic lens, the international market an afterthought”. No doubt. US media’s foreign coverage is focused on how it shapes US policy and what it means for Americans. Too much of our news about the world ends up on our screens filtered through that perspective.

But is the solution to the Americanisation of the media really another US-based global player? 

It’s hard to argue with the Smiths’ assertion that much of legacy media is broken –– “too often cacophonous, tribal, partisan, radicalising, algorithmically serving the lowest common denominator and amplifying the basest content, presenting people with alternate facts that they want to hear rather than the shared facts they need”. (Although this ignores the significance of public broadcasters like the ABC in Australia, New Zealand and Canada.)

And it’s true, too, that journalism needs to pivot from commodified clickbait news. “Our crises — and biggest stories — are more global in scope than ever before,” Justin Smith said, ”from climate change to pandemics, rising inequality to supply chain disruption, political instability to misinformation and extremism.” 

But it’s not so certain that the answer lies in the mid-20th century American solution they instinctively reach for: “A modern, general-interest, global news business from scratch that serves unbiased journalism to a global audience and provides a high-quality platform for the best journalists in the world.”

Most of the educated English-speaking audience sought by the Smiths don’t live in the US (or even in other settler countries like Australia, New Zealand or Canada). They live and work in south and east Africa and south and east Asia. They’re not looking to be rescued from the east coast of North America. 

Many of the best English language journalists in these countries are already building digital native voices in their communities to provide the news and information that meets the needs and challenges of their societies.

These are the organisations — like Rappler in the Philippines, whose founder, Maria Ressa, was recognised with the Nobel Prize last month — that are pushing back against pressure from authoritarian or populist governments. (Not just in English; take Hungary’s Telex.)

They’re the voices that are experimenting with exciting ways of telling and distributing stories, whether it’s Paraguay’s El Surtidor’s data-lite visuals or Zimbabwe’s 263Chat distributed using the end-to-end encryption of WhatsApp.

It’s these voices that are likely to be most disrupted by talent-poaching and corralling top-end subscription dollars and premium advertising by yet another American corporation.