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Some months ago, while exploring files in the nearly empty, ink-blackened basement of the old New York Times building on West Forty-third Street in Manhattan, I came across a 1968 memorandum from Seymour Topping. The longtime foreign correspondent had just been put in charge of foreign news, and his memo outlined the changes he planned.
The emphasis on getting spot news first, Topping argued, was outmoded. This he chalked up to the "special challenge" of electronic journalism, with around-the-clock radio news and what he perceived as the glimmerings of real-time television coverage. "Foreign news dispatches on news agency printers," he noted, are "shown on TV screens at about the same time those dispatches come into the wireroom."
He also insisted that it no longer made sense for the Times to view itself exclusively as the paper of record, simply reproducing arcane diplomatic documents. "For much of the detail of the daily developments, which we formerly reported," Topping wrote, "the historian will go in the future to the computer-regulated data bank rather than specifically to The New York Times." This observation--made when computers were large, clunky machines owned by institutions, not individuals--was so far ahead of its time that someone had scribbled "?" in the margin of the file copy.
The Times under Topping became, as he directed, "less preoccupied with the daily official rhetoric of the capitals.... Our report should reflect more fully the social, cultural, intellectual, scientific and technological revolutions, which, more than the political, are transforming the world society." Soon Topping's title was changed from the traditional "foreign news editor" to the more commanding "foreign editor," which it remains to the present day. His competence and steady hand later elevated him to managing editor. But the significance of that moment in the paper's history transcends Topping's insights.
Owners, editors, and correspondents have constantly tinkered with notions of what foreign news should be, how it should be covered, and by whom. The Chicago Daily News created the first great newspaper foreign service, a model for systematic expert reporting by American correspondents. Owner-editor Victor Lawson, one of the greatest newspaper geniuses of all time, began the service on the heels of the Spanish-American War as "largely an experiment."
Understanding the evolution of this experiment, marked by trial and error, matters especially today. The edifice of foreign newsgathering appears to be disintegrating, rather like a massive building demolished by internal detonation--in this case, the exploding economic model for mass media. Respected foreign services run by The Baltimore Sun, Newsday, The Boston Globe, and The Philadelphia Inquirer have been obliterated. By late last year, none of the three broadcast networks stationed full-time correspondents in Iraq, a war zone with 130,000 American troops. Among weekly newsmagazines, the most telling trajectory is that of US. News & World Report. Over the years, the "W" in World on the masthead became progressively smaller. By November 2008, when the magazine announced that it would cease publishing a weekly ink-on-paper edition, it had eliminated all permanent foreign correspondents.
Still, looking at these changes against the backdrop of history tells us that all is not lost. Modern foreign correspondence is younger than professional baseball and psychoanalysis. We are merely in the foothills of change.
THE HISTORY OF FOREIGN CORRESPONdence falls into eras. Beginning in colonial times, printers of newspapers relied quite literally on foreign correspondence--that is, unpaid letter writers with news to share. They were equally dependent on stealing stories from foreign journals, which they rushed to collect from arriving ships. This led to a historical curiosity: although there were no editors, let alone reporters, newspapers carried a greater percentage of foreign news than at any time since. It was not unusual for foreign topics to take up the entire front page of Benjamin Franklin's Pennsylvania Gazette.
In the second period, beginning in the mid-nineteenth century, special correspondents emerged. There was George Wilkins Kendall of the New Orleans Picayune, who covered the 1846 Mexican War with a novel sense of urgency; Henry Stanley, who in the era's relentless effort to "make" news found Dr. David Livingstone in East Africa for the New York Herald; and George Smalley, who, after setting up a permanent London bureau for the New York Tribune, became famous for organizing coverage of major events by teams of reporters.
Victor Lawson's foreign service at the Chicago Daily News, which was eventually syndicated to more than a hundred newspapers, set the stage for the next era. When a Pulitzer Prize was established for foreign correspondence in 1929, Paul Scott Mowrer of the Daily News won it, with reports that read like analytical diplomatic cables. By this time, foreign correspondence had entered a golden age. Large numbers of knowledgeable journalists covered the world for newspapers, magazines, and the upstart medium of radio. They remained largely independent of the home office and, thanks to international goodwill toward Americans, were well received wherever they roamed. The news--two world wars, Communist revolutions, the emergence of global interdependence--was of towering significance. The celebrity and expertise of correspondents were never greater.
The transition from one period to the next never took place with one door slamming shut and another opening wide. Each was gradual, carrying forward vestiges of the past. And so it was with the emergence of the corporate correspondent, whose employer often owned many media outlets--not to mention other, nonjournalistic businesses--and answered to Wall Street. Satellite telephones and the Internet eventually put these correspondents in closer touch with their editors back home. It also made them less colorful and less independent, at a time when they were also perceived, like journalists generally, as less credible.
Which brings us to the present, an era that is only beginning to take shape but has a clear, defining feature: many types of foreign correspondents operating at once. Seasoned reporters representing major news outlets still exist, of course. But many new species of foreign newsgathering and distribution are appearing, most of them carrying some DNA of the past. We might call this era a confederacy of correspondents.
Coverage at The New York Times remains formidable. The McClatchy Company, which purchased most of Knight Ridder in June 2006, kept Knight Ridder's foreign correspondents attached to its Washington bureau--even as McClatchy's own stock price dropped in the wake of the purchase. After Rupert Murdoch acquired The Wall Street Journal, the number of front-page stories on foreign topics jumped; pages of foreign news were added inside. The Associated Press recently increased the number of bureaus abroad, which now total 102 in ninety-seven countries. Even the celebrity-focused Vanity Fair, recognizing that foreign news confers respectability, recently hired a foreign correspondent to help it get "meat."
But again, the traditional American foreign correspondent no longer strides the stage alone. Here are some of the additional players:
Foreign foreign correspondents, meaning those foreign nationals who work for American news organizations. While this type is not entirely new, it is much more common today. A survey I conducted with my colleague Denis Wu in 2000 found that 69 percent of foreign correspondents for American news organizations were not Americans. Some of these reporters start out as fixers, who help reporters and can move around more freely in dangerous places. The Baghdad bureau chief for McClatchy referred to them as "journalists in their own right" and "the backbone of our coverage."
Local foreign correspondents, who cover the world from their hometowns. This seeming contradiction in terms has come about because of burgeoning global interdependence. A 2004 survey by the Radio and Television News Directors Foundation found that two-thirds of local broadcasters said they integrated world and local news into their shows. "We're in a new era now, in which the ambiguity in what is international and what is not international is very great," said Don Oberdorfer, a veteran Washington Post foreign correspondent, at a recent journalism conference.
Parachute foreign correspondents, who are sent on short-term assignments abroad. The term is often used pejoratively to describe the phenomenon of permanent reporters being replaced by less expensive, less experienced interlopers. Yet it also describes a more positive development. Local media that could never afford full-time correspondents now send reporters on ad-hoc assignments abroad. Major news media use the technique to augment coverage--the Chicago Tribune, for instance, sent a music critic to Latin America, and an expert on religion to help a permanent correspondent cover the election of a new pope.
Premium foreign correspondents, who work for services that charge fees for specialized, in-depth reporting. The antecedent is Reuters, which started out in the mid-nineteenth century as a news service for financiers. Modem versions include Bloomberg News and now Jones Newswires, as well as Reuters' own "gated" premium service.
In-house foreign correspondents, who gather timely, accurate industry news exclusively for their corporate employers. These reporters operate in a gray zone between journalism, marketing, and corporate communications. At British Petroleum, for example, editors produce the so-called BP News, a daily summary of BP-related stories from around the world. Federal Express has a similar video operation called FedEx-TV.
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