Last Friday, did an unusual thing. It put a foreign news story on the front page.

The story, of course, was the terrorist attack in London, in which at least 52 people died and more than 700 were injured. It came on the same day that Bermuda's national cricket team qualified for the World Cup for the first time in their history. But only seemed to acknowledge the seriousness of the bombings, giving the two stories equal prominence on its front page.

In the Mid Ocean News, the cricket and the water shortage pushed the bombings to the bottom of the front page (continued in a short column on page eight). In the Bermuda Sun, apart from a brief mention on page one and a tiny slot in the news-in-brief section on page two (with the same prominence as a snippet about Portugal winning a prize for issuing the best stamps for the 2004 Olympics), coverage was relegated to page five.

In the absence of such a major story, however, foreign news rarely makes it to the front page at all. has a good international section, but you sometimes have to go as far as page 15 to find it. All three newspapers consider local news to be their primary franchise: partly because it's unavailable anywhere else, partly because of a lack of resources, and partly because that's what interests us most.

It wasn't always like this. Until the mid-1970s the front page of the Royal Gazette mixed local and foreign stories. Since then, the space allotted to foreign news has gradually shrunk. A few years ago, the Mid Ocean News offered a 16-page tabloid supplement that provided a weekly summary of international news. It was dropped due to a lack of interest from advertisers. Radio is much the same. The 15-minute local bulletins on Mix 106 FM have a couple of minutes of CNN headline news at the end, but that's little more than one sentence coverage of domestic US stories. For in-depth international news you have to tune to the BBC World Service on the AM band ? and put up with the awful sound.

Television also separates local and foreign news. For local, switch to ZBM or VSB at 7pm. For the US, try the American broadcasts that follow. Caribbean news can be found on ZBM at 8.30 p.m. For a more global perspective, there's BBC World.

In the UK, avoiding international news requires effort. Television and radio bulletins and the front pages of the newspapers mix domestic and foreign stories. For example, a couple of weeks ago the UK's Guardian newspaper had front page stories on the implications of the US Supreme Court's ruling against the producers of file-sharing software, and the news that one in six countries face food shortages this year. Both approaches have their merits.

In Bermuda, the partitioning of the news means it's easier to just get the stories you're interested in. On the face of it, that's a good thing. Why should someone who is uninterested in, say, European news be forced to sit through it on the evening newscast? However, it's also easier to remain ignorant about what's going on in the rest of the world. Perhaps that's why Bermuda can sometimes feel a little parochial. If you want to hear international news you have to actively seek it out. Choice is the way of the future, however. We want to decide what news we get, when we get it, and in what format. It's something the traditional media are only just getting to grips with.

For example, newspapers give me information I'm not interested in (sport, classified ads) in a format that's not suited to my lifestyle (I drive to and from work and can't read in the car). Radio doesn't give me what I want (a single bulletin mixing local and foreign news) at the time I want it (when I start my drive to or from work). Television doesn't work for me because I rarely have the time to sit down and watch it.

The Internet is changing this. It's already easy to use a computer programme called a "news aggregator" to automatically pull stories from websites you like into a single location on your computer. Now podcasting is taking this one stage further, allowing you to download audio files. These can be played on your computer or transferred to a digital music player, enabling you to listen at a time and place of your choosing. I'm already downloading podcasts of BBC radio news programmes and listening to them in the car on my way to and from work. If ZBM or VSB were to make their bulletins available as podcasts too, I'd be all set.

Keeping abreast of international news is easier than it has ever been. The difficulty is persuading people to take an interest.