Typically, international news is gathered by a correspondent who is located abroad and regularly files stories to a news editor in the home country. Often, the correspondent is based in a foreign capital where he or she maintains relationships with government officials, members of the community, local media and sometimes other journalists on the ground who can provide information about important developments in the region.
Correspondents are trained to find and report on news stories that are most relevant for a domestic audience. They are often assigned to cover a specific region or a group of countries. They may be tasked to focus on the political, economic and social developments that are most significant for a given area or region and to report on how these developments might affect their own country or its citizens.
International news introduces some unique issues and challenges that are distinct from those faced by domestic news coverage. For example, scholars have noted that the general repertoire of news values—such as conflict, magnitude, and surprise—that determine whether a development is newsworthy are often modified to some degree when it comes to international events.
Further, studies have shown that the amount of time and space devoted to international news can vary dramatically between different journalistic outlets. In addition, analysis suggests that the amount of international news coverage focuses on superpowers and a subset of countries of geopolitical interest and that audiences in various parts of the world receive meaningfully dissimilar depictions of the same global event.