By next week, 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 Monitor series on Oktoberfest. 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 important. 

The trend is for American newspapers to be scaling back international coverage. Generally speaking, international news doesn’t sell in the United States. And it is fantastically expensive. What papers usually do best is cover their own communities.  

But what does the Monitor do best? 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 qualities that drive world events – justice, equality, compassion, trust, honesty – know no borders. To understand the news is to understand how the struggle over these qualities shapes our experience worldwide. That is what news is. 

For a news organization tasked with bringing the world closer in profound ways, new possibilities are always emerging. For my part, I hope to share with you 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. The Monitor has long been touted as “an international daily newspaper.” This year, we’ll take a small step toward further proving that, while it is based in Boston, the Monitor is for the world.