Enough navel-contemplation and thumb-sucking.

Readers will take us seriously when we treat them like grownups in writing about the larger world.

For years after I began writing editorials for a Detroit audience, I searched for the perfect latter-day version of the Afghanistan editorial - one so remote, so irrelevant that it was certain to fall on deaf ears.

Finally, I thought I had found it: Albania. No sooner had I reached that puckish conclusion than we had gang warfare break out between two rival factions of the Detroit Albanian community. People cared enough to shoot at each other - and probably, under provocation, to shoot at editors who might say the wrong thing about Albania.

What I have discovered is that my community cares a lot about foreign subjects, as long as our writing is grounded in some real knowledge and offers a real perspective. That's one reason I have made such heavy use of NCEW's foreign travel opportunities.

On the long flight back from the 1994 trip to China, I counted up how many countries I had visited, most of them through the good offices of NCEW. I got up above 40 before I fell asleep on the plane. That's a comment on how many there were, not on the dullness of the subject.

Each time I have gone abroad, I've come home and done a week-long series on the trip, which we have usually also turned into a reprint booklet and sold. On at least two of those trips - to the Soviet Union in the early '80s and China in 1994 - I've been taken aback by the response. In both cases, with only in-house coupons to advertise what we were doing, we've had to print extras to meet the demand.

The real benefit, though, comes years later, when you can write with knowledge and passion about a place and people suddenly in the news again. I approach foreign editorials the same as I do other subjects - by trying to connect them to what I know the readers care about, by knowing the limits of my knowledge, by respecting the intelligence of the readers. We are dealing with adults, prone though Americans may be to self-absorption. And when we treat them like grownups I think they take us seriously, too. The challenge is to show them how it ties in to what is going on in their lives.

I'm frustrated that so many editorial writers have let their publishers conclude that our craft is about contemplating your navel or sucking your thumb. I'm convinced some investment in foreign travel and continuing education can add cogency to our editorials. People want help in processing information about the larger world. They want us to show that we have some real help to give.

NCEW member Joe H. Stroud is editor/senior vice president of the Detroit Free Press.