TFCN Global News Summit: Culturally Intelligent Newswriting

The TFCN Global News Summit was in the Netherlands. I was in London. So I gave the talk from a laptop, and that turned out to suit the subject.

On 21 September 2025 I spoke to the summit online. TFCN is The Filipino Correspondent Network, a group of Filipino journalists and correspondents who file their stories from outside the Philippines. The summit ran on 20 and 21 September in the Netherlands. I joined on the second day, because I was in London that weekend for the Philippine Studies Conference at SOAS, the School of Oriental and African Studies at the University of London.

My topic was culturally intelligent newswriting.

What culturally intelligent newswriting means

The correspondents at the TFCN Global News Summit live this problem every day.

A Filipino correspondent abroad writes with two readers in the room at once. First, there is the community being reported on. Then there is everyone else who will read the piece without sharing that community’s assumptions.

So there are two ways to lose. You can explain a community to outsiders in terms the community itself would not recognise. Or you can write only for insiders, and lose everyone else at the first unexplained reference.

Culturally intelligent newswriting is the habit of noticing which of those you are doing, sentence by sentence. It is not softer reporting. It is more precise reporting, because precision includes knowing who is reading.

That was the case I brought to the room. Not a style guide. A question to ask before filing.

Why the TFCN Global News Summit worked from a laptop

TFCN also organises its coverage by region. Europe, the Middle East, the Philippines, Asia Pacific, the United States. That is not a website menu. That is where the correspondents actually are.

So a network like that does most of its real work at a distance. The virtual room is not a downgrade from the physical one. It is the normal working condition of the people in it.

That is also the argument in miniature. A story crosses a border and something happens to it. A newsroom spread across five regions has to think about that every day, not once a year at a summit.

Two rooms in one weekend, then. A conference on heritage in London, and the TFCN Global News Summit in the Netherlands. Scholars in one, working deadlines in the other, and the same question underneath both. Who is reading this, and what will they hear.

What I learned from that room is that the people who need cultural intelligence the most are rarely the ones who use the term. They just know, from experience, that a story lands differently depending on where it is read.