This is an interesting and difficult problem.
I think a possible solution lies in having a diverse range of sources. With a bit of news about each country, from that country, in the (main) local language.
So one process could be: Google for ‘country name & news’ in the local language. Find the leading news source and include the first five items from their RSS feed.
So for Danish for example I google “danske nyheder” which leads me to here: <![CDATA[Seneste nyt | DR]]>
This would ensure that there is at least some news of interest to each country, in the local language albeit the mainstream narrative. It would begin to give you different perspectives on global stories.
I think this would be an interesting baseline that could just be included by default.
If it’s all curated by those who already have access to technology you are never going to get many votes for news about Uganda in Swahili for example.
I’m not sure how big it would be each day but probably more than 2Mb… Bandwidth aside you could then start to add some ‘curated’ news, on top to get alternative perspectives.
Maybe this project could be useful: http://globalvoicesonline.org/
What is Global Voices?
“We are a borderless, largely volunteer community of more than 800 writers, analysts, online media experts and translators. Global Voices has been leading the conversation on citizen media reporting since 2005. We curate, verify and translate trending news and stories you might be missing on the Internet, from blogs, independent press and social media in 167 countries.”
It would be good to get an idea of how much space was going to be given to the Core/ News/ Adverts
500Kb for Core, 500Kb for News, 1Mb of adverts? What are the suggested proportions?