Foreign Desks

Nicholas Kristof observes that "Only four American newspapers now have foreign desks." He goes on to suggest that technology may partially mitigate this problem, but veers off the direction of something fairly exotic: "One new venture is Demotix, which offers aspiring journalists a chance to upload their articles and photos for others to see — and some possibility that news outlets will publish them."

I think a better way to think about the web's impact would be something like this. How many foreign desks was a typical American actually able to read back in 1978? For most people, I think, the answer was one or two. Today only four American papers maintain a foreign desk but it's easy as pie to read any or all of them. And of course you can also read foreign coverage in British papers or read The Times of India's coverage of explosions on Bangalore.

I think the foreign coverage of professional journalists can only be very partially replaced by citizen journalism. But it's really easy to see how it can be replaced by other professional journalists. As newspapers, television networks, and radio networks all increasing move in a digital direction it seems to me that we can easily imagine a world in which there are 15 or so different global brands offering substantive general-interest global news coverage in the English language and everyone with a broadband connection is able to access all fifteen of them.

Comments

a world in which there are 15 or so different global brands offering substantive general-interest global news coverage in the English language and everyone with a broadband connection is able to access all fifteen of them.

Or they could watch "American Idol" on TV. That Simon Cowell is too much!

Posted by James Gary | July 25, 2008 1:52 PM

A bigger problem is television news devoting so little time to international stories and so much time to things like car crashes (using stock photos instead of photos of the actual car crash under discussion) and other shock stories. So many viewers seem to also think that it's the job of these international stories and reporters to be patriotic to the US, but it's actually their job to inform. All of this means we don't know enough about the world so that when something like 9/11 happens, so few people know enough to put it into any type of context that they can understand it (or even be able to find Afghanistan on a map) and people are thus more given to panic and easier to dupe.

Posted by Reality Man | July 25, 2008 1:53 PM

Don't foreign countries have local press? If they put their stories on the web and in English then we can read them here. Why should American news organizations be so important? If there are important local stories people will link to them and they will become widely known. The boring stuff will be left to freaks who want to know the flip-flops of French politicians.

Posted by Craig | July 25, 2008 1:57 PM

How many foreign desks was a typical American actually able to read back in 1978? For most people, I think, the answer was one or two.

I think this misstates the problem, because it assumes that they all report on the same thing. It may well used to be the case that there were a dozen papers (as opposed to the current 4) with a China bureau. This certainly increased the odds that at any given time, some papers were writing stories out of Beijing, others out of Shanghai, with others in some remote region reporting on, say, a mine disaster. After all, it isn't as if there is only *1* story at any given time that may be of interest to domestic readers. With consolidation, the odds are increasingly likely that the foreign bureaux of the respective papers are chasing the same story.

And it is a similar mistake to assume that increased access to foreign papers replaces the function of these lost foreign bureaux. A story has different implications for local readers of the "Times of India" than it does for an American (which isn't to say that the perspective of the "Times of India" may not be important or interesting).

In Canada, it is currently a big story that the Canadian government is refusing a passport to a Canadian citizen stuck in Sudan (where he claims he was arrested and tortured by the Sudanese at the behest of the Canadian and American intelligence agencies). A big component of this story is that the refusal to give him a passport (preventing him from travelling, even home) is to curry favour with the Americans, who suspect he has connections to terrorists. Well, it's difficult to see how this story would resonate with Sudanese readers, so that it may not even be covered by the Sudan News Agency. It is only the foreign desk of a domestic paper that is going to be able to provide meaningful coverage. But with fewer domestic papers having an African bureau(x), and with the number of other important stories out of Africa, the chances of this story being reported intensively are reduced.

Posted by McKingford | July 25, 2008 1:58 PM

Why isn't the answer to all of this merging newspapers? Merge the NY Times with the Times of London -- huge economies of scale that would benefit lots of people who consume news. Wouldn't hurt to have some British-style press investigation of the U.S. gov't, either.

Posted by Chris | July 25, 2008 2:04 PM

I like McKingford's point.

I'd add that what matters isn't so much how many "global brands" of news coverage there are, but how many of those brands are owned by Rupert Murdoch or General Electric or a small number of other entities whose self-interest (including but not limited to their interest in having access to important politicians) affects their choices of what to cover and how to spin it.

Posted by Tom | July 25, 2008 2:13 PM

Of course once we get to 15 universally read global news sources 14 of them will be owned by Rupert Murdoch, General Electric and Clear Channel Communications.

Posted by steve duncan | July 25, 2008 2:16 PM

Merge the NY Times with the Times of London -- huge economies of scale that would benefit lots of people who consume news.

I don't think they need to merge newpapers, but I don't understand why newspapers can't just having relationships with foreign newspapers to exchange reporting. I.e., the NY Times would have a relationship with the Guardian, where the Times gets UK coverage from the Guardian, and the Guardian gets NY and DC coverage from the Times.

As I think about it, though, most papers already have something akin to this - they get their foreign news from AP, or Reuters, or AFP. Basically, foreign desks have been outsourced to the AP and other news agencies.

Posted by Al | July 25, 2008 2:25 PM

I don't understand why newspapers can't just having relationships with foreign newspapers to exchange reporting.

Because the point of view of the reporting differs depending on the intended audience. Take, for instance, Obama's speech in Berlin. As a news story, it is different in kind for an American than it is for a German. Would it really do for an American political junkie to simply rely on Der Speigel? I think not.

Posted by McKingford | July 25, 2008 2:33 PM

One of my favorite books is Eric Ambler's "Background to Danger", circa 1937 or 1938. The hero is a freelance journalist, an Irishman covering foreign affairs in Europe. When I grow up I'm going to be a freelance foreign journalist covering foreign affairs in Europe. With foreign desks closing it sounds like there will be an opening in the freelance world.

Posted by Jeffrey Davis | July 25, 2008 3:05 PM

In the same way you can go to Slate and see links to Newsweek articles or to the Washington Post and read posts from TechCrunch, shouldn't newspapers cut syndication deals with international news websites and then feature the content on their own sites?

Posted by The Pop View | July 25, 2008 3:12 PM

Considering that these days I need to go to BBC, CBC, or the various British and Canadian papers to get decent coverage of things going on here in the US, this whole question strikes me as a bit funny.

Posted by NonyNony | July 25, 2008 3:30 PM

McKingford's post is fantastic, but I think you can push his point a step further.

Matt assumes, in essence, that foreign bureaux work in absolute isolation; that they are separate and discrete entities. So if there used to be twenty American newspapers with offices in London, and today there are three, that might seem bad - but if readers suddenly have access to the reports of all three instead of just one among twenty, the net effect is actually positive for their readership.

That gets reporting fundamentally wrong. In fact, reporters feed off of one another, and also compete for stories. So if you turn twenty American reporters loose, you don't simply get twenty versions of the same story. You don't even just get twenty different stories. More often than not, when one journalist files an important story it spurs another to follow up, and then a third will call her own sources to amplify on the first two reports. So if any of those twenty had found something truly important, it was likely to eventually appear in stories filed by the other nineteen. We really were getting the benefit of all those different bureaux. And not only that, but since different reporters had different strengths and sources, their work often had a cumulative benefit.

It's also worth pointing out that Matthew Yglesias is not the typical American consumer of news media. I suspect the actual effect will be a heightened divide. A small percentage of relatively elite, well-educated consumers will exploit the greater opportunities for access to information from abroad. But when the average local paper arrives on the doorstep in the morning (and for all its ills, the newspaper industry remains the principle producer of important journalism in this country) it is suddenly far less likely to prominently feature news from abroad. That's because papers are predisposed to feature their own content - their 'value-added' material - and dislike putting stories from the newswires on the front page. After all, their readers could find the same story almost anywhere these days. So we'll not only have fewer reports being filed, and fewer reporters trying to ferret out information abroad - it's also overwhelmingly likely that the demise of the foreign bureaux will reduce the amount of foreign coverage to which the average American is exposed.

I know there's a tendency in the blogosphere to dance upon the grave of the MSM, but really, it's tough to see how this is a good thing.

Posted by Cynic | July 25, 2008 4:01 PM

McKingford's points are right. Also, do you trust the journalism coming out of all countries? Anybody want to compare the New York Times' China coverage and China Daily's? Also, as a former resident of Japan, Japanese newspapers aren't known for their hard-hitting government coverage.

I'm not saying the Traverse City Record-Eagle has to maintain staff in Karachi, but there's obviously justification in having a few more foreign bureaus kept by US newspapers.

On a side note, is it me do radio and television news shows resort more and more to asking print reporters to push a story? Every time I turn on NPR or Newshour, it seems more than half the people being interviewed are newspaper reporters asked for their take on the matter.

Posted by Ben | July 25, 2008 5:43 PM

I'm not saying the Traverse City Record-Eagle has to maintain staff in Karachi

Heck, it doesn't even maintain staff in Petoskey.

Posted by rea | July 25, 2008 8:18 PM

Matt: "And of course you can also read foreign coverage in British papers or read The Times of India's coverage of explosions on Bangalore."

Or if you read the Asia Times, Matt, you might get a fucking clue about Afghanistan and Pakistan.

http://www.atimes.com

Posted by Richard Steven Hack | July 26, 2008 12:50 AM

"I'd add that what matters isn't so much how many "global brands" of news coverage there are, but how many of those brands are owned by Rupert Murdoch or General Electric or a small number of other entities whose self-interest (including but not limited to their interest in having access to important politicians) affects their choices of what to cover and how to spin it.

Posted by Tom | July 25, 2008 2:13 PM"

Not only that, but Phoenix Television, which is partly owned and started by Murdoch, is perhaps the premier privately-owned source of anti-American nationalist propaganda in China.

Posted by Reality Man | July 26, 2008 10:55 AM

People still read newspapers?

Posted by jim | July 26, 2008 12:14 PM