It’s Really Cheap These Days For Media, Even TV, To Have Foreign Correspondents Around The World

And one cannot really explain this away by saying that the media is doing what surveys tell them to do – concentrate on local events (for the networks local means national) because if one picks up a European newspaper or watches a European newscast the local/national scene is very well covered, but then so are international stories, too.

But the US cannot escape the fact that what goes on in the world around it actually does affect the country directly and the more choice Americans can have in reading or seeing those foreign events can only be good for its democracy.

But media economics of the past few years has acted against that – the networks have been shutting foreign bureaus galore, as have newspapers. Sure, the Washington Post, the New York Times, Chicago Tribune, and Los Angeles Times – the really big metropolitans -- still have some bureaus, but many other newspapers that did don’t any more.

But the new technical world we live in means that today a media outlet can have a foreign correspondent for the same cost as having a reporter in the suburbs.

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For newspapers it’s really simple. Hire a fulltime local in, say, Geneva, Switzerland, to cover the various UN meetings, human rights issues, the climate change debate etc. The local doesn’t need an office, a home office suffices. With wireless technology and a laptop, the story can be written and transmitted to home office across the Atlantic directly from the news site. Cost of transmission – something which in the old days used to be prohibitive -- is now zero. No wireless or direct internet connection? Merely connect via mobile phone connection for transmission and the cost is an international mobile phone call lasting less than a minute.

And what about matching pictures for the story? Simple, shoot with an electronic camera, transfer those pix to the laptop for cropping and editing and then the transmission is the same as described above. And what’s that – for the web site you also need video? With broadband transmission, no problem. And while you’re at it why not an audio feed? It’s all the same principle.

In the past the big cost was the body on location and the office. The days of sending your own people overseas with huge added benefits are long gone for most news organizations. There’s nothing wrong with hiring a professional local, and if there is a fear the local doesn’t know or understand the “ways” of the organization, then with trans-Atlantic plane tickets as cheap as they are these days if booked far enough ahead of time, it doesn’t cost more than a couple of New York City dinners for two to bring the correspondent to home base for a week to immerse the writer in how things are done, meet editors personally etc.

And as for the correspondent and home base keeping in frequent touch, you can hold daily teleconferences and the cost is zero. This writer, for instance, uses Skype to teleconference regularly from Europe to his son in Orlando, Florida. Using the cheapest of the cheap webcams (around $30) the color reception at both ends on full screen is great. The audio quality is perfect and while it’s not the same as “being there” it is the next best thing.

So that’s all well and good for print and online media, but what about TV? Everyone knows that gets expensive what with editing suites, camera people, sound technicians, and the like. Not anymore.

An announcement by ABC News on Thursday should not go unnoticed. It is adding seven international one-person bureaus, and it freely admits it is doing it on the cheap, and why not?

The seven new reporters – based in Seoul, Rio de Janeiro, Dubai, New Delhi, Mumbai, Jakarta, and Nairobi – will be one person operations. Each will carry a digital video camera and they can do all the editing they need on their laptop. For transmission they use broadband to New York, although they’ll also have a portable satellite dish for when broadband is not available.

In ABCs case they decided to send their own staffers to those new cities rather than hiring locals, but assuming they pay those staffers what a local would earn on the scene then the cost shouldn’t be much different. The savings for the networks comes from not having to have big offices with editing suites, producers, camera people, sound people etc. all on the payroll going out and being the team that covers a story The team now is one person who does everything.

It’s doubtful that we’ll be seeing the Diane Sawyers and Barbara Walters of this world doing their interviews single-handed, but that is the new way things are going and for journalists the word “multi-tasking” now takes on a whole new meaning.

As ABC News President David Westin said, “Technology has dramatically changed how we gather the news around the world.” And hopefully that also means that Americans, and visitors to America, will now have more chance to read and see and hear for themselves what is going on in the world around them.