The foreign correspondent of the future
There will always be a need for “ground truth” and “bearing witness”, but existing foreign correspondents and the organisations they work for will have to let go of some outdated features of the job and embrace others to survive in the future.
Innovation in reporting from abroad is generally coming from outside of the established media, and the crisis that broadcasters and newspapers currently find themselves in is specific to the western world – emerging market media is enjoying a boom.
That’s according to a study by Richard Sambrook, “Are Foreign Correspondents Redundant?”, which he presented Wednesday night at Reuters in Canary Wharf flanked by an impressive lineup; editor-in-chief at Reuters David Schlesinger, Channel 4 News international editor Lindsey Hilsum, BBC’s head of newsgathering Francesa Unsworth and AlJazeera’s executive producer for programmes, John Owen.
The 114-page study was written by Sambrook (see the video interview at the end of this post) as a visiting fellow at Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism (RISJ). He proposes that economics, technology and globalisation are the three main pressures “undermining the role of foreign correspondent and providing opportunities – and imperatives – for news organisations to adopt a very different approach to reporting international news.”
It was encouraging to hear a very strong and rare tone of optimism about the future potential for media and journalists alike in covering foreign news and issues.
Although the days of expensive foreign bureaux are probably as good as finished now, he notes that “there will be innovation and new opportunities to more than compensate for what is lost.”
Many of the foreign correspondents I know have long been working out of his/her second bedroom, using FTP and web-connections, mobile phones and digital cameras. Travel budgets are tight. Some of them have steady gigs with newspapers or broadcasters. Others are freelancers living without housing allowances or travel budgets, and often operating with their own gear and without health insurance.
What the panelists agreed on last night was that journalists who are now multimedia – who can write a report, shoot and edit a video and take decent photographs – are generally young 20-somethings fresh out of the world’s journalism colleges. And that as media owners increasing pull back their permanent correspondents abroad altogether and rely more heavily on freelancers who are multimedia capable, that the job in turn becomes a ‘young person’s game’.
I don’t share that view – and not just because I’m in my mid-thirties and gearing up to relaunch www.mexicoreporter.com next year. There are a multitude of great freelancers out there in their thirties or older who have embraced the technology changes of the last ten years and can multitask. Their advantage over recent graduates is that many of them have been working as journalists for at least 10 – 15 years already, so are proven safe pairs of hands and have worked for many respected media owners prior to going it alone.
To mention a few: Michel Marizco, owner of www.theborderreporter.com and freelance multimedia journalist, David Axe, founder of www.WarIsBoring.com and a freelance war correspondent, Greg Brosnan, freelance multimedia journalist for his multimedia production company StreetDog Media and documentary filmmaker, Graham Halliday, freelance journalist and founder of Kigali Wire, and Guy Degen, a freelance journalist and owner of Notes From The Field. The list goes on.
The night left me with some big questions.
As Sambrook rightly points out, news is fragmenting and as the middle ground has fallen away news providers are left with three main roles.
The first is coverage of breaking news and live events – of which the recent Chilean miners story is a good example. The second is deep specialist niche content with analysis and expertise – the Financial Times and other business-focused publications do that, amongst others. And lastly, the aggregation and verification of other source of information – the Huffington Post, The Drudge Report and others.
My first question is how are journalists going to do the analysis if they’re covering breaking news? There are only so many hours in the day, and the multimedia nature of journalism jobs already puts huge time pressures on correspondents.
Secondly, where do those three priorities leave the investigative, off-the-beaten track stories that require a lot of work to dig up? Is that no longer viable in the future of foreign reporting?
Thirdly, it does seem like freelancers based abroad could well stand to pick up some of the work left up for grabs as foreign offices close. But that raises a number of issues. Will the media change its relationship with freelancers? Obviously a housing subsidy will soon be a thing of the past (and has never existed for non-staffers as far as I’m aware), but will media owners give freelancers more help with accreditation and access, training, insurance and expenses? In return, how will media owners check the credibility and independence of freelancers they use?
Finally, in the case of video commissions from broadcasters and (increasingly) newspapers for foreign cameramen / producers, will media owners be prepared to move away from the TV model of reporting using front-of-camera correspondents? If they’re not sending their reporter out there to cover the story, it’s going to be tough to shoot a piece to camera when you’re also behind the camera (unless you’re Kevin Sites of course – check out his work), and video journalists are increasingly coming up with new ways of telling stories that do not use the piece-to-camera model.
We can only wait and see what the answers to those questions will be as foreign reporting continues to change with the times. But it’s good to hear confirmation from such an authority that the profession is changing, but not extinct.
Category: editorial, Featured, hostile regions, journalism, media, video
