Handling News & Navigation on Global intranets

Michael Pastore wrote an article "With Globalization, All Intranets Are Local" which was published in the Intranet Journal. Thanks to James Robertson, Column Two who led me to this.
I'd like to comment on two points under Advice for Global Enterprises at the end.
Common and local news
He says "In Keohane's experience, global corporations tend to have an umbrella group in their home country that will update company news that impacts everyone involved. There are intranet groups in certain regions around the world that add their own personality for local employees." I agree, and would like to add some details from my own experience.
All "common" news (with the exception of strategic announcements, major global policy changes, etc.) originates from a local point somewhere in the global organisation. It may even first appear on a local intranet site, be noticed by corporate communications, picked up, re-written for a global readership.
If the communication network works well, it will be handled in a less ad hoc way, possibly through a common news repository with appropriate tagging, letting each communication manger find and use what is relevant for their users.
A key skill for local communication and management is to know when a piece of news they consider local is also of common / global interest. "Who else would like to know about this?" An example of a best practice is the guideline "first publish the news at the highest level based on pertinence for users, then link to it from other sites". This of course requires good collaboration and a system for author and/or source recognition so that local communicators don't lose their visibility just because they offer their work to the corporate news site.
The issues are different when a news item is created by HQ and local management feels a need to re-write or re-position the item, to make it more meaningful in their own context. Corporate communication does not like this, of course - high risk of misinterpretation.
The way to avoid these conflicts is to have an agreed strategy based on internationalisation best practices where the piece of content itself is designed to have the global part and the local part. When it comes to large organisations, there may well be three parts: a global travel policy, localised by a business division (based on their job categories), then further localised for a specific country (taking local travel conditions into account).

Central control
Keohane says "It's more likely today that navigation, logos, and other common elements are centrally controlled." I agree, but would add that the items mentioned are of vastly different importance. Logos can and should be centrally controlled.
However, navigation is different. It represents the values and strategy of the organisation, the relations among the different parts of the organisation, the role of the individual within the organisation. The higher levels (1 and 2 at least) must be defined in a collaborative way through intensive work with local intranet teams.

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