In response to The Boston Globe’s recent decision to close its foreign bureaus (see here), Washington Post columnist Fred Hiatt writes that international news is still essential:
[E]vidence suggests that newspapers aren’t replacing their own reporting with an equal amount of copy from elsewhere. After Sept. 11, there was nearly universal acknowledgment that Americans would be better off if we knew more about the world. Yet by 2004 the percentage of articles related to foreign affairs that American newspapers published on their front pages had dropped to “the lowest total in any year we have ever studied,” according to a report by the Project for Excellence in Journalism and Rick Edmonds of the Poynter Institute. (It was 14 percent, down from 21 percent in 2003 and 27 percent in both 1987 and 1977.)
Maybe the old model just can’t work anymore. Though The Washington Post has managed to maintain its stable of 20-plus foreign correspondents, no newspaper, including The Post, is insulated from the pressure of Internet competition for advertising dollars. Nor are the television networks, which have cut way back on their foreign bureaus as well.
Yet in an era when clan structures in Somalia or separatist movements in the Philippines may have a direct bearing on U.S. national security — when the people who run multinational companies such as GE regularly complain that Americans don’t understand the world — we should all worry about who, if anyone, will report from abroad.
Hiatt is correct: International news is more important now than it ever has been. A flat, globalized world means that a person thousands of miles away can affect my life almost as much as my next-door neighbor.
However, the financial reality is that local and regional newspapers can no longer afford to provide their own original coverage of national and international affairs if they must statisfy shareholders. (See here for why.)
The solution? Large, daily newspapers like the Globe need to be privately owned by people who do not mind lower profit margins. (See here for my reasoning and here for a Slate column on how the Sulzberger family could take the New York Times private as well.) Then newspapers could perform more original — though costlier — work again.
