Times journalist Lydia Polgreen announced on Twitter that she is "starting a new gig, leading a team that will explore publishing the New York Times in languages other than English."
Good luck with that. Dow Jones just announced it was discontinuing its local-language websites in Germany and Turkey and its Turkish-language newswire, though it does produce Spanish-language content. The Times did publish a Spanish-language version of its recent editorial calling on America to restrict the immigration of Cuban doctors, and it published a Chinese-language version of its recent editorial about the visa issues facing Times journalists in China.
More broadly, the announcement made me think of the joke, sometimes attributed to Molly Ivins, about Patrick Buchanan's speech at the 1992 Republican National Convention, that it probably sounded better in the original German. In what language, exactly, does the Times think there is a larger audience for its content? Arabic? Farsi? Russian? French? Yiddish? Anyway, it's an interesting development — you have a newspaper company funded by a Mexican billionaire (Carlos Slim) and led by an Oxford-educated British former BBC executive (CEO Mark Thompson) — trying to grow by appealing to non-American audiences, or at least non-English-speaking ones. At best the Times could bring American values of transparency (don't tell Jonathan Gruber) and freedom to the rest of the world; at worst the Times could further erode whatever residual pro-American patriotic values it has by changing its content to try to make it appeal to non-American audiences.