Business Globalization Creates New Reporting Borders

Intel's biggest customer has long been Japan. At one point, Dell had more employees overseas than it did in the United States. Mexico is the second-biggest supplier of this country's textiles.

And yet, a bulk of business coverage deals only in the domestic.

The business world doesn't give borders a backward glance, so neither should business journalists. Commerce stretches across continents, and so should our coverage. Globalization has turned from a tech-era buzzword to a current-day corporate revolution, and business may be the easiest route to explore it. From food to crude oil, from suppliers to customers, the intersections between American and foreign industries start resembling one massive spider web.

On the one hand, a Chinese company whips out the checkbook for IBM's personal computer division. On the other, Wal-Mart executives are wooing India's prime minister to lift the country's ban on global chains. Not to mention readers who are wearing clothes from Taiwan, eating food from Ethiopia and taking tours through the Dominican Republic.

"People live by continental lives. We haven't caught up with the reality of our readers. We're stuck in an old world view that is now obsolete," argues Daniel Sneider, a foreign affairs columnist for the San Jose Mercury News, where one-third of the local readership is foreign-born. "The population is much more interested in this than newspapers understand."

So let's start understanding. Because the more we think our money revolves around our 50 states, the more we miss writing the next chapter on business enterprise.

Start with your interviews. Beyond the routine revenues conversation, Sneider says to ask executives who they talk to, how they approach the marketplace, what information they look for to stay competitive and who their rivals, suppliers and customers are.

"There's a lot of pack journalism here," he says. "But you need to step back and put things into context. You need to reframe the issue."

Part of that takes education. As if ours doesn't already require a master's degree to understand, reporters now need to learn the innards and cultural nuances of multiple economies. That could take anywhere from a nine-month fellowship to a two-year overseas stint to regular reading of the local ethnic newspaper. But that will inform your stories, which will in turn inform populations miles away from the East and West coasts.

"The U.S. media has the widest penetration in the world," points out Manjeet Kripalani, BusinessWeek's India bureau chief who wrote award-winning cover stories on the surging Indian economy. "Doing U.S.-centric stories is not serving the reader because the world is at the reader's doorstep already."

Serving the reader means, as always, following the trail of money as it jumps borders and crosses oceans. Who's collecting it, who's paying it? How much of it is leaving the U.S., how much of it is coming back in?

We've got a $55 billion trade deficit, which answers some of those questions. Though, ironically, at least one-fifth of that trade lopsidedness is thanks to American companies manufacturing their own products abroad, then importing them back here. That is vintage globalization.

Still, the story is not just what's happening today. It's about what that means for tomorrow. Pull out the long-term lens to see this story and its effects clearly. A firm's new international branch this year could mean billions more in revenues in a couple years, and a doubling of its American work force a few years after that. Each step into global terrain has future implications for even the most local economy, and it's worth calculating them for five, 10, 20 years down the line. After all, transformative trends do tend to take their time.

Take China's new yuan, for example. Now its value will be judged against a cluster of currencies, as opposed to sticking to a fixed amount as it has for the last decade. Not what you'd consider eye-popping news. But BusinessWeek says that in the next decade, that currency change could turn China into "a global monetary power."

Sometimes, it's easiest to zoom in to get the global view. Follow a company to the tips of its international branches to see how much green they're sprouting. "The true sign of how well a company's overall strategy is succeeding is often its overseas operations," Kripalani says. "Is it imaginative or is it controlled by headquarters? How does it weigh up against the best local competitors in everything from cost to branding?"

Or pan in on a product as it bounces across latitudes and longitudes to move from assembly line to checkout line.

The Los Angeles Times mastered that approach when it pursued the source of Wal-Mart's $8.63 Polo shirts in its Pulitzer Prize-winning series last year. One story revealed how the retail behemoth's buying decisions in Bentonville, Ark., had consequences "in a remote Chinese industrial town, at a port in Bangladesh and … in Honduras, under the corrugated metal roof of the Cosmos clothing factory," where one woman was being paid much less than $8.63 to sew more than a thousand of those shirts in a 10-hour day.

Finally, swing the spotlight on other industries that globalization has spawned. There's the entire league of foreign investors, expansion strategists and mutual and hedge funds heading abroad.

But also think everyday life. What about the neighborhood strings of ethnic restaurants and grocery stores? And the international aisles at your local food marts? And the ethnic cable and satellite channels that stream a snippet of overseas heritage into American family rooms?

Not all globalization news is good news, of course. Columnists and analysts fret in unison over America's brainpower leak. Some worry about its lower percentages of the world's highly educated population, others about its receding grade school quality. The end result, they nod glumly in agreement, is a less competitive -- a.k.a. less privileged -- United States.

We're sitting in the front row of that kind of scene change, and we have a responsibility to narrate that in our stories. After all, the rest of the world already seems to know how the story will turn out. Shouldn't our readers?