Warning: The Following Magazine May Challenge Prevailing Opinion.

It’s perhaps fitting that I’m writing this from the last major city that will ring in 2020. Yes, dear reader, I’m hard at work in Honolulu as we send the forecast to press and I’m very much looking forward to the year ahead. It’s also fitting that I’m writing this from one of the outermost time zones because something rather odd happens when you’re this far behind the global centres of decision making: you soon realise there’s a certain pleasure that comes with being a little off the global conversation. When you’re 19 hours behind Tokyo, 10 behind London and five adrift of New York, a lot of decisions and discussions have happened while you’re either fast asleep or tucking into your lightly grilled opakapaka (think of it as a pink snapper). Although there’s a thrill that comes with being at the centre of the chatter and breaking news, there’s also a great relief at being able to absorb, digest and analyse when geography leaves you far from the world’s major editorial hubs.

For the past year there has been considerable discussion across our own editorial floor about the luxury that comes from stepping outside the English-language news cycle and not relying on three or four major New York/London-based news outlets that are stuck on the same five stories, plus another three or four with themes that play a dangerous game of clickbait dressed up as righteous campaigning. If you’re blessed with a command of a second or third language then it’s easy to obtain a broader world view by dipping into the pages of Norway’s Aftenposten, France’s Les Echos and Brazil’s Folha da São Paulo, or tuning into a cultural debate on Austria’s orf.

If your German or Portuguese isn’t fully polished, you needn’t feel left out. Mr Google’s translate function does a decent to occasionally excellent job of getting the point across by swapping an opinion piece or weighty bit of reportage into your language of choice. For sure, a bit of nuance is lost across 1,800 words of analysis on modern Poland and there’s a lack of beauty in the prose of a 3,500-word interview in Die Zeit. But, at the very least, you’ll walk away with a perspective that is far away from what’s being trotted out as a “world view” by the English-language media.

Spend a bit of time in the pages of Spanish, French, Mexican, German and Swiss dailies and you’ll soon realise that things aren’t quite as straightforward as the English-language powerhouses would have us believe. And thank heavens. Whereas less popular points of view have been shut out in many English-language media outlets, controversial opinions can still find a full page in a very respectable outlet elsewhere.

Before I touched down at my base in the mid-Pacific, monocle hosted a small but punchy cities conference in Chengdu in early November. Over a lively hotpot dinner with various delegates (most of them British, Australian and Dutch) there was a point when the volume of conversation lowered and my dinner guests started glancing over their shoulders and speaking into their napkins – not because of the volcanic Sichuan peppers spiking every mouthful but because they had something potentially potent to say. It was at this point that I was reminded how stifled conversations have become in the English-speaking world and how terrified many people are of putting a foot wrong by being culturally insensitive or not being abreast of the latest “no-go” topics – and having a point of view that’s not part of the mainstream.

By now you might be familiar with this parallel global conversation that is happening across dinner tables, in quiet corners of dimly lit bars, between the seats of heavily upholstered cars and anywhere else that people find themselves out of earshot and among those they can trust. Only in these safe spaces can differing views be presented, the seemingly absurd be questioned or the clearly ridiculous dismissed. We like to think that all these media platforms allow for a grand, global discussion but it couldn’t be further from the truth. Instead of providing a variety of views and allowing for intelligent debate, too many English-language news outlets have shifted to the default stance of being do-good campaigners rather than taking the balanced position of being questioning news outlets.

As monocle develops its story line-up for 2020, we want to ensure that we present a variety of views and opinions that are well removed from the narrow agenda being driven by others. Ours may not be the most popular take on the world but that’s just the way we want it. We’re here to question, to challenge and, more importantly, to present perspectives that fail to find space in other outlets.

I welcome your thoughts on the above; you can get in touch with me at tb@monocle.com. In the meantime, thank you for all your feedback and support during the course of 2019. I can assure you that it encourages our fresh take on global affairs, business, culture and design – and all the other elements that define the forecast and monocle. Cheers.