International news translation platform Worldcrunch plans to expand its aggregation efforts in a big way—by enlisting the help of its contributors in finding “crunch" worthy articles from around the world, Nieman Journalism Lab reported.

Founded last year by Jeff Israely and Irène Toporkoff in Paris, Worldcrunch translates 20-30 articles per week written by its international news partners, which include French daily newspaper Le Monde and German daily Die Welt, as we previously reported. The articles, chosen by Worldcrunch’s team of journalists and covering topics such as politics to entertainment, are meant to provide English readers with broader perspectives of international affairs, as well as highlighting the viewpoints of citizens from the countries in question.

Worldcrunch has been touted as an appealing option in the face of reductions in foreign news coverage, as we previously reported. And the trend seems to extend past English-speaking readership: French weekly magazine Courrier International and Italian weekly Internazionale provide similar services for French and Italian readers, respectively.

"Foreign news is undergoing a transformation. For more than a hundred years the principal means of learning about events in the rest of the world has been through the reporting of journalists based abroad. (...) And we are now entering a new era where they may no longer be central to how we learn about the world".

So starts the summary of the book "Are Foreign Correspondents Redundant?" written by the long-time BBC journalist and executive Richard Sambrook, presented yesterday at the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism at Oxford University.

"A wide range of pressure are undermining the role of foreign correspondent.(...) The economic pressures of maintaining overseas newsgathering have seen the numbers of bureaux and correspondents persistently reduced by major Western news organizations over the last 20 years or more", Sambrook states. "At the same time, digital technology has transformed both the gathering and distribution of news, providing, among other things, the opportunity for a "networked" and more open model for reporting international affairs, with internet blogs, aggregators, and new models of low-cost online news and information."