Boston to Berlin

By the time some of you read this, I will be living in Berlin. 

No, I am not part of some editor exchange program. You should not expect the chief of the Süddeutsche Zeitung to announce a seven-part series on Oktoberfest in the next edition of the Weekly. This is about my family – the fact that I am the only member without German citizenship, and yet we have never lived in Germany. It was time to do that before my kids are no longer kids (which will be shockingly soon).

Yet the fact that the editor of The Christian Science Monitor will live in Germany for a year does say something about this news organization and what it values. 

Not far from the Monitor offices is the headquarters of The Boston Globe – a publication with equally proud Boston roots. Today, the Globe has not a single foreign correspondent. This is not schadenfreude, to use a delightful German term. Rather, the Globe made an eminently logical decision. Generally speaking, international news doesn’t sell in the United States. And it is fantastically expensive, to boot – a problematic combination, even for those committed to it. 

Did the Globe really need its foreign correspondents? What can it do better than every other newspaper on the planet? It can cover the Boston area. The new motto on its front page reads, “Serving our community since 1872.” 

But that’s the thing. What does the Monitor do better than every other news organization on the planet? I would argue that it offers a transformative view of the world itself – that the human story is more interconnected and more hopeful than much media coverage would have us believe. The Monitor can’t not cover the world. To focus only on the United States – or any other country – would be to misapply its mission. Qualities like compassion, respect, generosity, and honesty know no borders, and to understand how they shape the human experience requires chronicling how the struggle over them is convulsing the world. That is what news is. 

That is also how you can end up with the editor of The Christian Science Monitor living in Germany for a year. As a practical matter, none of this could have happened before the pandemic, whose onset flexed the concept of the workplace in new ways. And there’s no inkling of moving the permanent home of the Monitor or its editor. 

Yet for a news organization whose goal is to bring the world closer in profound ways, new possibilities are always emerging. For my part, I hope to share with you during the course of the year the insights gained from broadening a sense of home and identity. For the Monitor’s part, I hope we are strengthening a statement that has always been true. Those looking to describe the Monitor have often referred to it as “an international daily newspaper.” This year, we’ll take a small step toward further proving that true. The Monitor is a paper based in Boston, but it is for the world.