Foreign Correspondents, Print

In 1928, the Chicago Tribune's Pictured Encyclopedia of the World's Greatest Newspaper defined foreign news in romantic terms, arguing that, at the mere mention of the words “we catch visions of a pith-helmeted correspondent dashing into the Sahara on camelback after a flying column of the Foreign Legion; we see another seated at a desk in some battlemented European castle, interviewing a statesman who holds the destiny of a nation in his hands; we envisage voyages on Chinese junks, airplane flights over the Holy Land, and all the color and lure of seeing distant countries and reporting international affairs.”

In a time when foreign newsgathering is more than ever a matter of national security, these descriptions are only partially true. Traditional print correspondents are still an elite (upper middle class, according to media researcher Stephen Hess). But since the early 1990s their numbers have been shrinking. Three-quarters of the nation's largest 100 newspapers have no foreign correspondents (The New York Times had the most in 1992: 37). The Associated Press, with many bureaus overseas, services 97 percent of the 1,600 U.S. dailies. At the same time, it is now rare for a reporter to be stationed abroad for years to develop expertise in a country or region's foreign affairs. Most come home after assignments of a few years. Nor is it only the traditional foreign correspondent who is reporting from abroad. That work is increasing accomplished by a variety of new types of journalists, in some cases local newspaper reporters who can travel abroad on short-term assignments, in others by non-journalists who report what they see and experience online over blogs—some of which ends up in traditional news stories.

Media ownership, advances in technology, America's involvement in world affairs, and the evolution of correspondents' roles and routines have shaped foreign correspondence ever since its early days in the eighteenth century.