[Reader-list] Vanishing foreign correspondents

[aasim khan]

Hi,

Perhaps the emotion here find a resonance in the
hearts of scribes on the list.

I want to add my own bit of reflection; a lot now
comes out in form of narratives published as
non-fiction. So is the Publishing cashing on the
talent made redundent by the Press? Non-fiction mostly
but even fiction .

Will be interesting to find out how many chinese
scribes are now rummaging through the streets of the
globe? And have they already outnumbered the Yankee
Corps?

One things is for sure; the TIMES they are changing.

Regards
Aasim

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Fred Hiatt is disheartened about America's shrinking
foreign reporting community

Dawn
Monday, January 29, 2007

By Fred Hiatt

Washington --- When my wife and I worked as foreign
correspondents for The Post in Tokyo 20 years ago, we
befriended and competed against a host of other
American reporters, including two talented writers
from the Boston Globe, Colin Nickerson (still a Globe
foreign correspondent) and Tom Ashbrook (now a star of
public radio).

The reporting corps had diverse views on the central
questions of the time, and even on what the central
questions were, and the reports we sent home reflected
that. Readers benefited from the diversity and
competition.

I thought of this last week when the Globe, now owned
by the New York Times Co., announced that it would
close its remaining three overseas bureaus, which no
longer include Tokyo, to conserve resources for
coverage of local news.

The announcement punctuates what seems to be an
accelerating trend. Journalist Jill Carroll, studying
foreign news coverage for a report published by the
Shorenstein Centre at Harvard University last fall,
found that the number of US newspaper foreign
correspondents declined from 188 in 2002 to 141 last
year. (If you include the Wall Street Journal, which
publishes editions in Europe and Asia, the decline was
from 304 to 249.)

I find it disheartening that a fine newspaper such as
the Globe would feel compelled to diminish itself in
this way. But maybe that's the nostalgia of a
dinosaur. After all, there are some very smart
business people who see no harm in newspapers cutting
back on foreign reporting.

Jack Welch, for example, the former chairman of
General Electric Co. who has expressed interest in
buying the Globe, said earlier this month on CNBC,
"I'm not sure local papers need to cover Iraq, need to
cover global events. They can be real local papers.
And franchise, purchase from people very willing to
sell you their wire services that will give you
coverage."

Brian Tierney, who bought the Philadelphia Inquirer
last year, expressed similar views in a November
interview with The Post's Howard Kurtz. "We don't need
a Jerusalem bureau," he said. "What we need are more
people in the South Jersey bureau."

Yet in an era when clan structures in Somalia or
separatist movements in the Philippines may have a
direct bearing on US national security -- when the
people who run multinational companies such as GE
regularly complain that Americans don't understand the
world -- we should all worry about who, if anyone,
will report from abroad.

Date Posted: 1/29/2007



		
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