With the Three Top Newspaper Categories for Recapturing Readers Being Local, Local, and Local How Come More Foreign Bureaus Aren’t Being Closed Down? Many are Beyond Their Final Payment Due Date

Philip M. Stone October 12, 2005

The announcement by the Tribune’s Baltimore Sun newspaper that it was closing its London and Beijing bureaus brings up a key question -- how come so many large metropolitan and regional US newspapers currently decimating their newsroom with buyouts, firings, not filling vacancies and the like aren’t closing down those costly foreign bureaus that on a priority basis surely must come bottom of the list?

The US television networks learned that cost-saving lesson years ago and have hardly any foreign bureaus remaining   -- perhaps London, Israel, and possibly Iraq, but long gone are the likes of Paris, Frankfurt, Rome, Nairobi, even Moscow – all victims to each successive annual budget cut. Today the likelihood is that when a network newscast shows foreign video (without on-the-scene reporting) it most likely comes from either APTN or Reuters Television with the voiceovers done either in London or New York.

But American newspapers, probably more for the pride and prestige than anything else, just seem reluctant to give up on foreign bureaus. Many of those foreign bureaus are relics of the past – times have changed and those bureaus don’t serve the need they once did.

Now this comes from a guy who spent many years as a foreign correspondent in various European cities for an American news agency, so every argument you can conceive about the necessity and importance of foreign news is accepted without question – the point of this article is not the importance of  foreign news itself, but rather how it is gathered, how it is paid for, and within a newspaper’s editorial budget whether there are more cost-effective ways to get that same information so that more funds can be concentrated on what needs doing most for US newspapers to survive -- increasing regional and local news coverage.

It boils down to foreign bureaus being a “nice to have” rather than being a “must have”.

Why does a newspaper need a foreign bureau today? The international news agencies -- AP. Reuters, AFP – and various syndicates cover the world fantastically well. Although newspapers don’t admit it, they buy that agency coverage for what is really a very small percentage of a newspaper’s overall editorial budget. News agency sales to newspapers are one of the cheapest buys in town.

Take the tragedy this weekend in Asia with the thousands killed in Pakistan and beyond from an earthquake. The news agencies with bureaus and stringers all over Asia are able to provide far more complete coverage of such an event than one correspondent sitting somewhere in a foreign office.

Having as many different accounts of an event obviously serves democracy best, but with the current carnage in editorial offices across the US it all boils down to priorities, and, yes, cost effectiveness. No doubt the dreaded “bean counters” can tell publishers what it costs for each word printed by a foreign correspondent as compared to the cost for each word printed on a local subject.

And with surveys showing that local news is more of a priority than ever before, then tough decisions about how foreign coverage is accomplished need to be made, just as the Baltimore Sun has just done. And that doesn’t mean less foreign coverage but it does mean a more cost effective way of printing such news.

Long before 9/11 when many Americans heard of the country of Afghanistan for the first time, the term “Afghanistanism” was an often-used expression in American journalism. It meant that when editors had more pages to fill than they had local copy, or they needed an additional editorial (leader) but could not think of a local subject to write about, that they would choose to write, run copy about, some far off distant country. No one really cared about the story or editorial, but it filled up the column inches.

An often-heard complaint by foreigners visiting the US is that they can’t find much foreign news in newspapers or on television – even the US cable news networks for their US audiences concentrate on US affairs. So is suggesting that US newspapers cut back on their foreign bureaus going to make that worse? No, it’s just that newspapers need to  “suck it in”, put the pride and prestige to one side, and instead of running copy from their own costly people they run agency or syndicated material. The public is still well served.

There is, of course, the argument that the agencies or major syndicated services for foreign news don’t cover everything, thus a newspaper’s need for a correspondent overseas. For instance, in the case of Baltimore, if their mayor went to London or Beijing it’s entirely possibly the agencies might give such “localized” coverage a pass (although if you actually ask the agency to provide the coverage it might get done), but in such cases having your local correspondent on the scene provides the depth of coverage probably not available from elsewhere. And if there are other local angles to international stories emanating from those cities then that’s another score for the foreign correspondent. But the fact is that’s not the way it is most of the time.
This writer recently did some consulting work with a European client that has a large Washington news operation. But what came out of that bureau for the most part was rewriting AP copy and rewriting the major items from the New York and Washington newspapers. That’s a waste of expensive foreign correspondent talent that should be concentrated on providing enterprise copy – stories originated from scratch of most interest to the readership back home.

We should remember that newspapers started their foreign bureaus in a communications world very different to what we have today. There were no 24-hour cable news networks; there was no Internet. You were either “there” or you didn’t have access to information except by the news agency.

With overseas phone calls costing an arm and a leg, and leased lines not cost effective except for the biggest agencies, even sending stories home via very expensive cable was prohibitive to all but the richest newspapers. (As an aside, because cables were charged by their wordage a new journalistic cable language grew up, a sort of shorthand by running words together. A classic example was when a reporter was fired and he cabled back to home office ”Stick job asswards”. )

But that was yesterday. Today’s communications world is very different. Most foreign correspondents keep the radio on, and if there is a local 24-hour TV news channel then so much the better. They may have available news from the national news agency; the morning newspapers are delivered early and scoured for the main news events. If there is something of interest perhaps some local calls are made to check up on some details, perhaps not, and the stories are filed. Perhaps an interesting lead is picked up for a future enterprise story – but there is not as much of that as one might wish.

What separates those correspondent stories from the original information is the “spin”, mostly reflecting a newspaper’s or its country’s own politics to the story.

But in such a communications world is it really necessary to have all those foreign correspondents doing that?  Take London, perhaps the most popular foreign correspondent posting spot on earth. Consider this:

The BBC makes all its national and local radio stations available in real-time on the Internet. You can be anywhere in the world and listen to them. All the national newspapers have their own web sites, and they often file material to those sites before they are published in print. So you don’t need to be in the UK to access those newspaper stories. The Press Association – the national news agency -- can be accessed for a fee on the web. Want to check up on some details, well the telecommunications are fine to the UK and if you use outfits like Skype which offer low cost communications to fixed phones, then being able to make those phone calls is really cheap.  Finding telephone numbers is relatively easy via the web.

The plain truth is that today you don’t need to be “in” the UK in order to provide complete coverage of the UK. Communications allow us to do things never before thought possible. There are few areas of the world where foreign correspondents usually congregate that such coverage is not possible. The new electronic world has changed dramatically the economics and the need for the foreign correspondent. And to be blunt, foreign correspondents do not come cheap. There’s the housing, the office, perhaps school for the kids, a car, … the list goes on and on.

More than likely the cost of one expatriate foreign correspondent is equal to at least three, perhaps more, local reporters at home. Local stringers are the better compromise.

So, yes, there is the prestige of having your own correspondent overseas. And all the arguments about what “being there” can do are perfectly valid, and serving democracy etc. etc., are all valid, but frankly the number one job of American newspapers today is to survive in the new competitive world in which they find themselves. The cost of such prestige just plain isn’t worth it at a time when newspapers are slashing local editorial staff numbers.  It is a prestige that most metropolitan newspapers can no longer afford, just as the US TV networks bit that same bullet.  

For a New York Times, Washington Post, or a Wall Street Journal where national reputations are at stake, the foreign postings are more important than just prestige, but even so when a newspaper like the Times announces as many editorial layoffs as it has this year one must question where the priorities fall. Because it is building its reputation as a national newspaper rather than a local New York paper then perhaps those foreign bureaus are more important for the business strategy. 

But even Dow Jones in a recent cost cutting exercise sent some expatriate Wall Street Journal editors based overseas back home. The Los Angeles Times that has long had a tradition of great foreign reporting must surely be asking how that now fits in to a strategy of increasing regional and local news. Is overseas where its editorial funds are best spent today?

The Sun’s announcement it was giving up London and Beijing pointed out that other Tribune-owned newspapers are continuing to keep their bureaus open in those cities, so their copy will be used in the Sun.  Which brings up the point of why is it necessary for each newspaper in the group to have its own correspondent in a particular city? Why can’t one correspondent’s story, unless of a strictly local home nature, not be good enough for Los Angeles, Chicago and Baltimore instead of perhaps three different correspondents working for the same company in the same city in different offices writing on the same subjects?  Again, the journalistic distaste against such a practice is understood, but in today’s newspaper economics all possible savings need to be looked at.

The independent Nordic news agencies, for instance, have long collaborated in such a way. Instead of the Finnish, Danish, Swedish, and Norwegian news agencies each paying to post their own correspondent in such a major expensive city as Beijing they jointly finance such a correspondent and the copy written is available to each agency. Far more cost effective!

Truth be told, it would be a load of fun to start today an international news agency from scratch with basically no overseas staffers. In a country where costs are low there would be a large newsroom divided into the various continents, and the various continents subdivided into countries/regions. And reporters would be continually watching satellite TV news from those countries, listening to the live radio from those regions available on the Internet, reading the newswires of the local national agencies plus the national and provincial newspapers on the web, picking up and rewriting what the agency needed, making phone calls from the center for clarifications or additional facts. Newspapers could request specific local coverage of foreign events (the visit of their mayor a country) and that would be the main task of local stringers, assuming such coverage could not be picked up on the web in a timely manner.

Plenty of journalistic bricks could be thrown at the purity of such an operation, but at the end of the day the question would have to be put to those media buying the service,  “How good is it?” And the answer for a vast majority of media would be, “Good enough”.

And the cost? Well, even better.

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