BOB GARFIELD: We start with the story of a journalism professor and reporter in southern Minnesota named Doug McGill. Two Decembers ago, hundreds of Ethiopian refugees in his community started receiving frantic phone calls from their relatives back home. Ethiopian soldiers had marched into the town of Gambella, near the Sudan border, and were systematically murdering villagers there. McGill heard about the calls, interviewed the refugees, and wrote about it on his blog. In so doing, he broke the story of the massacre of more than 425 people, part of the Ethiopian government's ethnic cleansing campaign against the ethnic Anuak minority. His story was then picked up by local, national and international media. In other words, it was a scoop, reported from thousands of miles away. It would have been unimaginable before the proliferation of cell phones and the internet, and it points to brave new reporting possibilities. McGill calls it "glocalized journalism," which he defines as the illumination of, (quote) "invisible strands of mutual influence connecting every town and city to the rest of the world." Doug, welcome to the show.

DOUG McGILL: Hi, Bob.

BOB GARFIELD: Give me some examples, besides the ethnic cleansing one, of "glocalized" stories.

DOUG McGILL: One of my first stories was, I just walked in to the local Penney's department store, and I, I picked up the first 30 pairs of socks that I found, and I made a record of where they were made, and most of them were made in China and some were made in South America, and two were made in the United States. And I also found, in the gift shop in the same mall where I was, that the coffee cup for my town, which is Rochester, the coffee cup called "I Love Rochester" coffee cup was also made in China. And I wrote about that. I just wrote about the experience of going to my local mall and finding out where things were made.

BOB GARFIELD: Since time immemorial, newspapers have been finding local angles to international events by writing about the infamous area man, the local man, the clichéd gimmick for finding that precious local angle. How is "glocalized journalism" any different?

DOUG McGILL: Well, I really think of glocal journalism not really as a strategy to come up with a story for tomorrow's newspaper. It's more like an ethical standard that I try to apply to every story I write. Just about every story that you can think of written in journalism, if you just set aside the time to ask yourself "What's the largest possible useful and applicable context of this story?" In today's world, it's usually a global context. So I think it's the journalist's responsibility to illuminate that context. I think the idea of glocalism – it has that moral quality to it to, you know, figure out what's the impact of what we do on others, and what's the impact that others have on us? So, in that sense, I think of it as the golden rule in journalistic terms, and it just turns out that it's a great strategy for getting wonderful scoops on stories as well.

BOB GARFIELD: It sounds like you're saying that glocalization is almost the reciprocal of the area man cliché in that it's finding a local manifestation of a story and going out and, and finding the international explanation.

DOUG McGILL: Oh, that's, that's exactly right. I mean it goes both ways. It's the local impact of international events, and it's the international consequences of local events, sometimes.

BOB GARFIELD: Does this really mean that you're doing some sort of special sort of glocalized journalism as you call it, or does it just mean that technology has created a situation where, in order to be a foreign correspondent, you neither need to be abroad nor to have a gigantic news organization behind you, like the New York Times, where you once worked, or like Bloomberg, where you once were a foreign correspondent. Doesn't it just mean that you can do lots of things in your basement that before you had to have a press card to do?

DOUG McGILL: I, I think both things are true. I think that technology really makes new ways of journalism possible, and it does empower the small person without a lot of resources. But I think also that the glocal philosophy is something that opens your eyes to possibilities, and it suggests avenues for research and for journalism that you wouldn't otherwise see. There's a methamphetamine epidemic going on in Minnesota right now, and it's been going on for some years, and it's really a terrible problem. But I have yet to see one story in Minnesota so far, except on my web site, that explains that the methamphetamine epidemic started in Thailand and came to Minnesota and other places in the United States, and I've yet to see a really good story explaining how that happened, and how the Thai people responded to its epidemic pretty effectively in ways that we could actually learn from.

BOB GARFIELD: One of the advantages of writing about foreign events from Rochester, Minnesota is that you are not inhibited against the, the many attacks on press freedom that occur where bad things are happening abroad. How much influence does just the protection of writing from within the United States afford you?

DOUG McGILL: Well, I think for example with the case of the Anuak, it's enormous, and definitive. I, I literally don't worry about getting a knock on the door at night from a member of the Ethiopian defense forces, and you can bet that I would have a lot to worry about if I was publishing this in, in Ethiopia, for example. We have such freedom in the press in the United States, and every day journalists have this opportunity to go out and write fearlessly about society and about the world. And I just think that journalism, as it's practiced in the United States, doesn't use that freedom enough to the advantage of people who need it. And the internet gives us the possibility to use journalism in the United States to the advantage of people around the world who need these freedoms. We can write about problems in Ethiopia or Mexico or Russia or Iraq, and yet the stories can get there and can get widely distributed, and they will be used by the local populations to improve their lives. In a sense, it's the facts carrying themselves.

BOB GARFIELD: Doug, thanks very much.

DOUG McGILL: You're welcome.

BOB GARFIELD: Doug McGill is an adjunct professor of journalism at the University of St. Thomas in St. Paul, Minnesota and a blogger at McGillReport.org. [MUSIC UP AND UNDER]

BROOKE GLADSTONE: Coming up, how individuals and nations try and fail and try again to set rules for the vast uncharted territory of cyberspace.

BOB GARFIELD: This is On the Media, from NPR.