By Clement Charles, CEO & Founder, AllTheContent News Agency
As the world continues to shrink, and its borders grow more permeable, the regional pertinence of messages has never been more important. Regardless of a company or an institution’s business or global communications strategy, localization has become one of the fundamental recipes for success.
Respecting local languages and specific cultural features of a given region are some of the major challenges faced by the information society, as defined by international organizations, people across the globe and their representatives. Localizing does not equate to translating.
Localizing content must, beyond translating a document into a local language, involve a degree of enrichment, via adapting to a target audience’s cultural and legal practices, to content consumption practice expectations, to a given calendar, or to any other element specific to the consumption context of the content, be it information or communication.
In Switzerland, a country where the respect for local cultures is at the heart of institutions, localizing content is an essential parameter regarding the quality of offers and their capacity to supply the most adapted information to a specific target audience.
While the Swiss press faces an unprecedented crisis, a large section of micro-local media, such as the Journal de Morges, the Broye or Gruyère, seems to be overcoming the situation, remaining in stable situations, and sometimes even increasing their circulation and their revenue.
As for the small screen, while the focus of regional channels launched over the last ten years is more and more territorial, 2009-2011 saw the birth of “neighborhood channels,” geared more specifically to neighborhood audiences, and to transcending the contradictions stakeholders face between a local mission which is seen as an obligation arising from the concession, and regional ambitions, commercially attractive but hard to finance in the current context.
To overcome this integration, any global organization, or organization acting at a level beyond the immediately local, must be based on a decentralized organization, or form a network where the presence of regional localization teams will ensure excellent local adaptation, perfectly adapted to the content’s consumption content. Globally local.