American newspapers pull back from foreign coverage

If you want to be a foreign correspondent for a major U.S. newspaper, you might be 20 years too late. The business people say those resources would be better off spent on local coverage.

An excerpt from the Washington Post column by Fred Hiatt:

Journalist Jill Carroll, studying foreign news coverage for a report published by the Shorenstein Center at Harvard University last fall, found that the number of U.S. 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."

"I don't see us sending 25 people to do me-too coverage of Katrina," Tierney went on to say. "I can get what's going on in Iraq online. What I can't get is what's happening in this region."

Now, if papers staff fewer foreign bureaus, is that being made up by using more international wire copy? Nope.

After Sept. 11, there was nearly universal acknowledgment that Americans would be better off if we knew more about the world. Yet by 2004 the percentage of articles related to foreign affairs that American newspapers published on their front pages had dropped to "the lowest total in any year we have ever studied," according to a report by the Project for Excellence in Journalism and Rick Edmonds of the Poynter Institute. (It was 14 percent, down from 21 percent in 2003 and 27 percent in both 1987 and 1977.)

I remember listening to a speech by the Associated Press's Kathy Gannon, who covered Afghanistan and Pakistan for the service. She spoke to some U.S. editors in the summer of 2001. One of them asked her, "why should we care what goes on there?" Her silent response? "You'll find out."