See also...

Why global news is more important than ever

John Maxwell Hamilton, who covered news abroad for The Christian Science Monitor and ABC Radio, among others, is dean of the Manship School of Mass Communication, Louisiana State University.

We owe our ideas about international news to Victor Lawson, a newspaper genius who believed world developments were too important to be left in the hands of foreign news agencies

Victor Lawson, owner of the Chicago Daily News at the turn of the 19th century.

FOR ANYONE WHO WONDERS IF THE history of American reporting abroad has lessons for today, the place to start is the tenement-like building that housed the Chicago Daily News at the turn of the 19th century. There on Wells Street, in his office on the top floor, owner (and newspaper genius) Victor Lawson conceived one of his greatest ideas, which he began as “largely an experiment.”

The Spanish-American War had just concluded, catapulting the United States into the ranks of the Great Powers, and Lawson thought it time to start a quality American foreign news service. The country needed, he thought, its own reporters abroad to gather original news geared to American interests. “It is no longer desirable, or even safe,” he told one of his editors, “for public opinion in this country to rely, as it now does, almost exclusively on foreign agencies, most of them subsidized by foreign governments, for their news of foreign countries.”

Lawson's experiment was bold. Chicago readers might care about foreign affairs when a war was raging. But on a routine basis? The first permanent correspondent, a star reporter named Edward Price Bell, went to London thinking the assignment was not really going to be so permanent, for it was clear the managing editor would happily “kill large slabs” of foreign news if he could. A few years later, when Lawson decided to send one of his brightest young city reporters, Paul Scott Mowrer, to Paris, fellow reporters and editors signed a petition urging the owner to keep him in Chicago where he could do more good. On top of all of this Lawson did not have a model to follow and so tried all sorts of approaches, including a frivolous column from London called “Queer Sprigs of Gentility.”

Lawson's experiment was to succeed grandly. His reporters became experts in foreign affairs on a par with statesmen. During World War I, Bell was considered the dean of American correspondents in London. Lord Northcliffe, one of Britain's press barons, called him “the best American newspaperman London has ever had.” In 1929, the first year that a Pulitzer Prize was awarded in the category of “correspondence,” Paul Scott Mowrer won it. The New York Times and others emulated the Daily News, whose foreign service, at its high point, was purchased by well over one hundred newspapers.

The history of this experiment is, perhaps, most illuminating because of how it ended up. In 1978, the Daily News went out of business. The foreign service, which had been great for so many years, dwindled and disappeared before that grim day.

Foreign news, one of the greatest challenges in journalism, has always been an experimental work-in-progress. It is the most expensive news to gather and has the least value in terms of revenue. It asks much of reporters, who must cover wide swaths of the planet. And the consequences are the greatest. Foreign correspondents work on the front lines of our national security.

Many today say we are losing the battle to maintain the quality reporting that Lawson pioneered. In any direction we look, corps of correspondents are being cut back or eliminated. But a counter-case, based on history, can also be made: Foreign news will survive, although it will continue to change.

To start with, traditional foreign news is not gone. The McClatchy Co., which sold off a few of the properties it acquired from Knight Ridder, kept the foreign correspondents attached to the Washington bureau and has hung on to them even as its stock price and the economy have plummeted. The Associated Press is stronger than ever abroad. The New York Times is maintaining its leadership. The Wall Street Journal has recently added foreign news.

Traditional media, however, are likely to work differently in the future. One change will be in the role of bureaus. We shall see correspondents, more often, become issue experts as much as place experts, roaming to cover health or technology or terrorism or other trends with global sweep.

The ease of modern travel, which facilitates correspondents moving among regions, will make it easier for reporters based at home to go abroad. “Parachute journalism” is often frowned upon as a cost-cutting technique that turns journalists into ill-equipped firefighters who cover news episodically. But even though fire prevention is an important role for correspondents, who must be stationed abroad for long periods to do this, it also makes sense for a newspaper to send a religion reporter to cover the election of a new pope, as the Chicago Tribune did for the most recent such event. Furthermore, parachute journalism is a net plus for smaller newspapers that never before have had a correspondent abroad permanently.

ASNE took a serious look at this a few years back when Edward Seaton, editor-in-chief of The Manhattan (Kan.) Mercury, was president. The resulting handbook of practical suggestions for covering foreign news with locally available resources, “Bringing the World Home,” was written by former AP foreign correspondent George Krimsky.

We also can expect greater use of foreign nationals. Even the Daily News, which favored American reporters, had Paul Ghali, whose mother was descended from Avignon popes and whose father was an Egyptian judge at the International Court. But non-Americans will become more routine now. Cost is one reason. Locals, for instance, do not need special allowances for housing and their children's education. Practicality is another. Americans are not so well loved as they were half a century ago. Locals, who often start out as fixers, have greater mobility to move in hostile societies.

Creative cooperative arrangements, which have always existed, will become more prevalent too. The Washington Post, for one, has looked for ways to leverage its foreign coverage at a time when the paper's circulation and revenue are deceasing sharply. In 2008, it split the time of a correspondent in Colombia with National Public Radio, and the Post had a similar arrangement in Iran with a correspondent for a Dutch newspaper. In a different kind of swap, it received news from Southeast Asia from the Financial Times and gave in return its prize-winning stories out of Iraq. As yet one more twist, the Post purchased the money-losing Foreign Policy magazine in hopes to make it profitable by linking it with its online news. “In a world that is so big and complex,” said David Hoffman, the Post's assistant managing editor for foreign news, “I don't cover it all. I am always looking to expand my resources.”

Another line of attack for foreign news will be aggressive foreign reporting by premium services. The obvious success story today is Bloomberg News, which has 2,200 news professionals worldwide — far more than have been lost in newspapers and broadcast during the 15 or so years it has taken to build up this overseas presence. The antecedents of Bloomberg are the mercantile newspapers of the early 19th century, which also charged a premium to its business readership, and Reuters, which started out as a private service for bankers only.

Here, by the way, is another lesson: What starts out as a “gated” service often expands into larger markets. For evidence of this today, Bloomberg stories now run in The New York Times and other traditional newspapers.

Bloggers and other citizen journalists also have their ties to the past. The high-water point of foreign news in terms of percent of the news hole was in the colonial era. Then, American newspapers relied, literally, on correspondents — letter writers who sent missives home — and foreign ships that hove into port with foreign journals that printers could plunder for news. “The Delay of Ships expected in and want of fresh Advices from Europe,” once observed Benjamin Franklin, proprietor of the Pennsylvania Gazette, “make it frequently very Dull; and I find the Freezing of Our River has the same Effect on News as on Trade.”

The quality of news on the Internet is, to say the least, uneven. Joe Wurzelbacher, who became famous during the recent presidential campaign as Joe the Plumber (although it turned out he wasn't licensed), recently covered the conflict in Gaza (even though he did not have any journalism credentials either) for the conservative Web-based Pajamas Media. But citizen journalists also come in the form of Salam Pax, the young Iraqi architect who anonymously posted personal dispatches on his Web site, “Where is Raed?” about conditions in his beleaguered hometown, Baghdad, before and after the invasion of Iraq in 2003. Pax was “better than the army of foreign correspondents in the country,” said Peter Maass, a contributing writer to The New York Times magazine who used the Iraqi as a translator without knowing about his blogging.

Sorting the Joe the Plumbers from the Salam Paxes is one of the biggest challenges ahead of us. The most likely solution will be branded sites that can do this for consumers. Those sites are likely to combine old verities with new technology, which is to say that trained journalists and editors will be involved.

One model taking shape is GlobalPost, which was launched at the beginning of this year. It has many of the moving parts mentioned above. The Boston-based enterprise delivers foreign articles, photographs, video, and audio over the Web by drawing on the services of contract correspondents on the ground around the world. Some of these “super stringers,” as they called them because of the expectations that they would file regularly, are Americans; some aren't. It quickly developed a partnership with VietNamNet, which carried reports by local journalists in Vietnam.

The brainchild of cable television entrepreneur Philip S. Balboni and former Boston Globe foreign correspondent Charles M. Sennott, GlobalPost expected to generate income from advertising on its Web site, by selling a specialized premium service to those willing to pay $199 a year, and through syndication to traditional news media. With an echo to Victor Lawson's experiment, the editorial focus was on news that helped Americans “measure the impact of international events on their lives in an increasingly interconnected world.”

Although veterans like to remember the good old days, the truth is that foreign correspondence has always been tenuous. Even in the heyday of the Daily News, staff knew that their acclaim was no guarantee of a bright future. This fragility showed up in little ways, as when Lawson ordered elimination of the word “stop” from cables to save money — a policy that led to endless editing headaches. And it showed up in big ways, as when the paper folded.

The future, as anyone can see by the angst and uncertainty that characterizes journalism today, does not lie in an absolutely clear path ahead. But it never has. And whatever we may think about what was great in the past, we must remember that journalism is a relatively new undertaking. Paul Scott Mowrer, who was editor of the Daily News through World War II, called it “the newest of the great public professions.”

What we can say with certainty is that foreign newsgathering has always been a mark of excellence in journalism. And there will always be journalists — owners, editors, reporters — who care about excelling. The innovative and bold ones, like Victor Lawson, will serve us best. *

Next ...Why global news is more important than ever