American Media Cut Back Their Foreign Correspondents Just As The British Media Increases Their US Presence In The US

Philip Stone July 10, 2006

Last October ftm questioned why so many American newspapers were keeping their costly foreign news bureaus going, when the emphasis was on saving costs and increasing local coverage. Seems the Tribune Company has also asked itself that very same question and the result is the closing of some bureaus and those that remain open will write for all Tribune newspapers, not just the one newspaper that sent them overseas.

The Baltimore Sun has announced that within 18 months it is closing its Johannesburg and Moscow offices – that on top of its announcement last year that it was closing London and Beijing. It is still keeping open its Jerusalem bureau. Newsday has announced that when current assignments end within the next two years in Beirut and Islamabad that those bureaus will no longer function.

The idea is basically to concentrate all of Tribune’s own foreign reporting from the foreign correspondents of its two largest newspapers –The Chicago Tribune and The Los Angeles Times and by the Jerusalem bureau that the Sun is keeping open.

But no longer will those foreign correspondents be covering events just for the newspaper that sent them overseas, but rather they are reporting for the entire group – something that ftm suggested last October as a cost-savings way forward for large newspaper groups that had correspondents overseas that were representing just one of their papers.

The Sun and Newsday no doubt will feel some loss of prestige that they are losing their own bureaus, but in today’s economic world where the survival of print probably depends more and more on local coverage, then foreign bureaus become even more of a  “nice” to have, not a must have.

And it’s not that those newspapers still won’t have their own foreign news coverage; it’s just that the coverage will come from sister newspapers in the group. Which means that any special requests for local angles and the like can still be handled, probably making life tougher for those foreign correspondents for Tribune and the Times, but at least they get to keep their overseas glamorous assignments.

That Tribune is undertaking such cost savings comes as no surprise given the company’s indebtedness following its $2 billion buyback of some 15% of its shares. Management said it would pay the debt load (the bonds are graded as junk) from current revenues, asset sales (it has already sold two TV stations), and from cost savings, of which cutting back on the foreign correspondents is a start.

Mind you, as ftm argued last year there it is still a legitimate question to ask whether many newspapers can afford the luxury of having to have foreign correspondents, and is there a legitimate need for them given that the trend in American print is for local, local, local. We laid out all the reasons why it was a fair question and why, if the correspondents were going to continue, that they should change their ways. Those arguments (click here) are even more valid today.

So if that is the case, how come British newspapers are doubling the number of their foreign correspondents in the US? The answer is that their need is the opposite of American print – those British newspapers are going after a global web audience, and their primary targets are Americans.

The Guardian’s print edition circulation is around 382,000. But online is has some 12.9 million unique global users, five million of whom come from North America. The Times has a print circulation of 664,000, but an online audience of more than eight million unique users, three million of them in the US. Both newspapers figure if they increase their American coverage then they’ll get even more US visitors who will like the British reporting style.

The question, of course, is whether those correspondents are just going to rewrite material that any web site can grab off the international news agencies about life in America, or are they going to go out there and do some original reporting – that doesn’t mean their own reporting of events others are also covering but rather coming up with those stories that others don’t have – what the agency business calls “enterprise stories”.

Already there have been comments from the editor of The Times that British writing about the arts and sports puts the like of the New York Times to shame, and he seems to think writing style is going to win the day – maybe it has a role but it’s content that is all-important.

The fact that Americans are basically starved for international news is probably the main reason The Times and The Guardian and the BBC for that matter have such a US web audience. Adding US correspondents to that mix to provide more American news is somewhat questionable, let alone very expensive, unless those correspondents really do come up with enterprise. If those web sites believe they need more American news, written in a British style, well, that’s what re-write desks are for!

For The Times and The Guardian to say they are after a global web audience puts them a bit into the category of becoming news agencies – a label they abhor. They still will not be filing their stories nearly as quickly as the agencies do, but will their journalists be told to continue writing as if they were writing for their home British audience, or will things change now that the target is global? The two are not the same!

Much has been made that their foreign correspondents will now have their copy filed first to web before it goes to print, but the real question is whether the content stays “British” or it goes global.

What is true is that many Americans are fascinated by things foreign– when this writer showed up to be a UPI salesman in Indiana in 1979 with a very distinct British accent after having spent 10 years in Europe that voice alone opened many doors; go to an American five-star hotel today and it gushes about how their toiletries come from Europe  -- and so it is not surprising that the British media are going to get some of that American attraction.

Just how much they can build upon it, and the right way to do it, remains to be seen.

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