Local news doesn’t stop at city limits. It follows your readers.

Why the arrest of Nicolás Maduro is a critical local story for Miami, Houston, and New York.

Visualizing the "local" impact of international news: The arrest of Nicolás Maduro in Caracas reverberates directly into the communities of Miami, Houston, and New York City. For newsrooms in these cities, this isn't foreign policy—it's a neighborhood story. (AI-generated image).

In my years leading newsrooms, I never saw “international” vs. “local” as a binary choice.

I’ve written before about Journalism’s Customer Problem, and this is exactly that. When we define news by our org chart (”International Desk” vs. “Metro Desk”) instead of our readers’ lives, we fail. If a story matters to our readers, it is a local story. Period.

That’s why I sent reporters to Israel, the Dominican Republic, and Sarajevo. Not because we aspired to be a global news service, but because our readers’ families—and hearts—were in those places.

This weekend, the arrest of Nicolás Maduro proves the rule.

It is a profoundly local story for South Florida, Houston, and New York.

With Maduro now in custody in the U.S., the story has literally landed in our backyard. I’m watching to see which community-focused newsrooms treat it that way.

• The ones sending reporters to Doral.

• The ones interviewing families in Katy.

• The ones asking what this means for the 600,000+ neighbors with Temporary Protected Status.

This is why I often say that Strategy Starts with Listening. You can’t know that the arrest in Caracas is the biggest story in Katy, Texas, unless you are actually in conversation with the people living there.

“We focus on local news” can’t be an excuse to ignore the stories shaping your readers’ lives. Sometimes your community’s story starts in Caracas—and ends up in a federal courtroom in Brooklyn.

Curious to see how community-focused outlets like WLRN, Houston Landing, THE CITY, Documented, and Miami’s Fourth Estate approach this in the coming days.

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What are you seeing? If you spot a local newsroom doing a great job covering the local angle of this story, drop a link in the comments so we can highlight them.

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