End of the Line
As the old saying goes, all good things must come to an end. And this here is our way of saying goodbye to the FreeFire🔥NewsWire.
Yep. It’s sad for us, too.
We want to thank each and every one of you for your “likes”, reposts, shares, and subscriptions to our channel(s). It was a lot of fun engaging with the world, at least while it lasted 😀
History
The FreeFire🔥NewsWire started out as a bit of an experiment to fill in the gaps of what is missing from mainstream news sources.
First, there is an overwhelming focus on the United States and news from the United States, so much so that sometimes, it can be almost impossible to find news from anywhere else.
It’s understandable that a US-based network like CNN would have such a heavy focus on the United States, but when you’re talking about a news network from a place like Malawi or Singapore, it makes a lot less sense to always be reporting on what’s going on in the United States.
And because of the fact that US news overshadows what’s going on in the rest of the world, our first step was to simply filter out all US news — that means everything from internal US matters like a flood or fire (or mass shooting) as well as more international news related to America like what the US President has to say about Country X or Y.
The second step was to filter out what US-based networks like CNN had to say about other countries. Therefore, even if CNN was covering, say, the protests in Myanmar, we would filter that out.
Why?
Our goal was to let people who are not American have their say about events because it’s so easy to get a US perspective elsewhere. Therefore, a country like Singapore or Thailand will have a different angle or perspective on, say, protests in Myanmar than will the United States.
Perhaps the easiest way to think about it is we created a filter to block out the bright sun (the United States) in order to better study all the other stars (every other country) in the sky (media).
Grammar and Spelling
Oh, and although it was relatively “minor,” part of our curation efforts went into cleaning up the misspellings and grammar mistakes that are rife in just about every single news source on the planet.
It might be forgivable for a writer in a place like Nepal (where almost no native English speakers live) to make some rather basic mistakes in English, but sadly, mistakes are just as common in British or Australian newspapers.
Honestly, if we had a dollar for every time that someone wrote “UN Secretary General” instead of “UN Secretary-General” (the hyphen IS required), we’d be rich lol 💰💰💰
Half the Planet
Originally, our focus was simply on newspaper articles or text pieces published in various non-US media, but then we started realizing just how many countries around the world have English-language news broadcasts, including places that you’d never expect like Mongolia (people speak Mongolian and Russian) or Suriname (people speak Dutch).
Eventually, we were up to an astonishing 40 countries which regularly publish English-language news broadcasts (as well as the UN daily news briefing), and another 40 or so countries that sometimes publish news videos in English.
Considering that there are approximately 180 countries in the world (the exact number depends on how you define a “country”), that means that we were covering HALF the globe on a daily basis.
That’s pretty darn amazing, in our opinion. And hearing from them directly, instead of being told about them by a US-centered network, is even cooler.
If we had expanded to French, Portuguese, and Spanish-language news, we could’ve gotten around 90% of countries.
Unfortunately, some countries (like, say, San Marino or Kiribati) are just too small to regularly publish news online. And some outliers like Tanzania and Botswana (where a lot of people DO speak English) just do not seem to be interested in publishing news online very much.
Lastly, of course, there are two “hermit” kingdoms: North Korea and Turkmenistan, which have zero interest whatsoever in participating in the (global) internet.
10 or Fewer
The problem that we ran into was that there is a generalized ignorance about most countries, in general.
Over time, we started discovering an algorithm that showed that, on balance, most countries’ news media only reports on about 10 countries per week. It doesn’t matter if it’s a small “poor” country like Malawi or a wealthy one like France — none of them ever seem to have much depth in their reporting.
The rule-of-thumb algorithm that most news media seem to follow is:
1) Domestic issues (i.e. the home country)
2) The/A (former) colony/colonizer
3) One neighboring country
4) The United States
5) Britain
6) Russia
7) China
8) France
9) Germany/South Africa
10) The USA’s enemy of the week
Number three is the one that’s especially confusing because many countries border three, four, or even five other countries, and yet they tend to only ever focus on one neighbor.
For instance, Romania is bordered by Ukraine, Serbia, Hungary, Moldova, and Bulgaria (five nations), yet Romanian news media tend to focus on Hungary nearly all the time and rarely on the others.
Furthermore, while it’s understandable that a country like Algeria would report a lot on its former colonizer (France), it’s also important to remember that a lot of countries still have colonies.
For instance, Niue is “kinda/sorta” New Zealand’s colony, and New Caledonia is definitely still a French colony. And even then, Bougainville is a “kinda/sorta” a colony of Papua New Guinea’s, which is a former colony of Australia, so news from Bougainville will focus on PNG while PNG news will focus on Australia.
The “enemy of the week” isn’t always necessarily an enemy per se, but the United States (and its enormous galaxy of media sources) really do seem to be unable to discuss more than one foreign country per week. And if the US is focusing on one country (say, Iran) in a given week, then news media around the world also do the same.
Therefore, if you look at a country like Namibia, you get a formula that looks like this:
1) Namibian news
2) South Africa (former colonizer)
3) Botswana (the 1 neighbor)
4) USA
5) Britain
6) Russia
7) China
8) South Africa (also a neighbor)
9) Germany (also a former colonizer)
10) USA’s enemy of the week
Clearly, with South Africa in two positions, it gets mentioned a lot. While Angola, a neighbor, is rarely if ever mentioned.
Likewise, here is Britain’s “top 10”:
1) Britain (England, Scotland, Wales, Northern Ireland)
2) Ireland (former colony)
3) France (the 1 neighbor)
4) USA
5) USA (also former colony)
6) Russia
7) China
8) USA
9) Germany
10) USA’s enemy of the week
Again, the above algorithm is only a rough “rule of thumb” and is not absolute. Somalia was briefly colonized by Italy and yet Italy is rarely mentioned in Somali news, etc etc.
Nonetheless, you can see that most news sources rarely cover even the full ten countries, or if they do, ten is just about the limit to what you’ll hear about/see in any given week.
Out of Context
If only around 10 countries get mentioned or covered in a week, then far fewer than half the countries on the planet get even a single mention in an entire year.
Most English speakers, for instance, can go for a year or even a decade without ever once hearing about what’s going on in eSwatini or Togo, which creates the impression that those countries “do not exist.”
And because a reader/viewer never hears about them or learns anything about them on the news, those countries disappear into a “black hole.”
Therefore, if there are elections in a place like Togo, and a news channel tried to cover it, the average reader/viewer would have no way to place that news in context. Did Togo previously have problems with their elections? Who is the current president of Togo? Who are Togo’s neighbors and economic trading partners?
Etc, etc.
Because the average viewer/reader has no context to interpret news from a place like Togo, it makes it all that much more difficult for the news media to report on an event in a place like Togo.
Whereas a news media saying “big protest in Paris” can rely on the fact that most viewers/readers know that Paris is the capital of France, and the audience might remember previous protests in Paris, etc., or the last presidential election in France, and has a lot more background context to work with.
A Vicious Cycle
Unfortunately, this lack of reporting becomes a vicious cycle.
1) You’ve never heard of Country X; therefore
2) You aren’t easily able to absorb news from Country X; therefore
3) There’s no point for your news to report anything coming out of Country X.
As such, Country X disappears into an informational black hole to the point where even a well-educated reader/viewer might actually say “I’ve never even heard the name of that country before.”
Those countries (and the people who live there) are, then, “erased” from memory and from existence.
And because of this, there is an unspoken assumption that nothing happening in those “erased” countries matters or is relevant to you, the reader/viewer. But, of course, this simply isn’t true.
For instance, there was very nearly a shooting incident between the coast guard of Palau and a Chinese fishing vessel in 2020. You may have never heard of Palau, but the country is closely aligned with Taiwan (and fairly hostile to China), so if the Palau coast guard had fired on the Chinese ship and sunk it, it would’ve had global ramifications.
Likewise, there is an old, abandoned nuclear reactor in the Democratic Republic of Congo that few people know about, but if it had some sort of accident and blew radiation into the sky, that would’ve certainly had a huge regional, if not global, impact.
Manufactured Ignorance
Last, but certainly not least, this overly focused approach of only reporting on a half dozen countries means that even the most educated reader has a hard time getting an accurate picture of what is going on across the world.
For instance, if there is an anti-GBV (gender-based violence) protest in Paris, and that is reported on the news (which it usually is), then the reader/viewer might be under the impression that the only people in Paris and France are protesting GBV.
But if a reader/viewer had access to a global picture, then they might see that ten or even twenty countries are also having anti-GBV protests, and that completely changes the equation. Now it’s not just a local/regional thing but something that millions of people across the globe are talking about and discussing.
It should be noted that this is exactly what happened in 2019 and 2020 — at least a dozen countries (particularly Spanish-speaking ones) experienced sustained anti-GBV protests and other related activities, and this opened up quite a constructive dialogue and had long-lasting political ramifications.
Furthermore, of course, since all global news media is so heavily focused on the United States, this means that any topic or news event that the US is not discussing gets lost in the background.
For instance, the US (at least as of the time of this writing) is heavily focused on the military takeover of Myanmar (in Asia), so pretty much everyone has heard/read about it. But when the military seized power in Mali (Africa), the US didn’t really care too much, and so neither did the news media in most countries.
Conclusion
Frankly, while we loved the ability to collate and curate news from around the world that displayed a wide range of perspectives, FreeFire🔥NewsWire was, to put it bluntly, way too far ahead of its time.
There’s no point in discussing and following the events, say, surrounding the murder of Andrea Bharatt in Trinidad and Tobago (T&T), even though it was a major story, because almost nobody even knows where T&T is, who its neighbors are, and how that story affects both the nation of Trinidad and Tobago as well as the Caribbean region.
Without that context, background, and previous reporting, there’s simply no point in curating news from a given country or region. Only people with direct ties to that locality have the background and context to be able to interpret news from that region, and those people are already (probably) getting all the news they need from there, while nobody else is interested.
FreeFire🔥NewsWire was never designed to be a money-making operation, but it does take time and effort to curate the news that got published every day.
At its “height,” FFNW was publishing 40 local news broadcasts, video news clips from another 40 or so countries, and text articles from at least another 40 so that we were tracking news from well over half the countries in the world. And that news corresponded to roughly 90% of the world’s population.
In other words, without receiving (or spending) any money, we were able to provide a timely, relevant snapshot of just about the entire globe, which is pretty darn amazing and cool, especially since literally no one else is doing it.
Unfortunately, no one really has any use for what we were producing. The few people who are tasked with tracking global events (like, say, the United Nations) already have their own news curation systems in place, so there really isn’t a “market” for our “news product.”
It was quite a lot of fun, however, to do something that quite literally never happened before in history, to watch in (close to) real-time what the entire planet is up to.
And we were just getting started on acquiring new sources of information such as NGOs that are “stateless” and doing things like rescuing migrants at sea, etc., or stopping illegal fishing.
Who knows? Maybe one day, if circumstances change, we will return. But for now, it’s time to say goodbye.
Thanks for much for reading/watching! 💋
If you have any questions, comments, hate mail, or anything else, you can email us at:
freefirenewswire@protonmail.ch
👋👋👋
