Please WPC locate your stories

[iainmann]

I enjoy WPC very much but I have one request. Will you please locate which part of the world stories relate to early in the story. Preferably in the top sentence.

So often there are stories of, say, a restaurant-finder app and it's not until the end...or sometimes not until you read the description in the app store...that you realise the app is only for the US, or India or wherever.

There is a tendency especially to write a story that applies to the US and simply presume it applies to all readers. It doesn't. The whole world does not live in the US.

It's simply the old journo rule....what why where when how all at the top of the story. Please remember the where.

 

[James Falconer]

I'll pass your note along to the editorial team. Thanks for the feedback!

 

[Daniel Rubino]

"The whole world does not live in the US."

What? This is news to me! /s

For the record, a lot of our staff/newsroom people are not US based, so we do bring in outside perspectives where we can. Regarding "mentioning it in the first few sentences" I believe we usually do this when we can, but I'll make sure the team is aware.

For other times where we neglect to mention the country or region for an app or service, the answer is simple: We don't know.

The fact is, Microsoft and their Stores do not make a region distinction anywhere available to users. So if we see an app here the US or UK store, no one has any idea if that app has region restrictions. The ONLY way to tell is when someone from said country tries to download it and they cannot.

There really is no solution for this, as (1) We can't possibly test every app/game for region availability and (2) If we took the time to try and contact the developer, our articles could be days behind, which causes other complaints about "too slow! I read this elsewhere!" nonsense.

In other words, we do what we can and try real hard to get that part of the story mentioned, but there are no tools or methods in which to verify this. Note that we often mention region/country stuff at the end because many people do not read the article, they skim to the end and grab the link, hence why it is almost always listed there too.

​Still, we'll try our best.