Technology can do wonderful things, but I doubt it's going to be enough to keep the Post's foreign news coverage at its current level once, as the Observer informs us, the paper replaces some foreign bureaus "with a roving reporter who will cover several areas and countries at once." This is from an internal memo:
These new assignments will not be based in bureaus as we
have known them. Instead, the correspondent will be the bureau. We need
people who can live and work for extended periods out of a suitcase,
who will organize their planning, reporting and writing around nothing
more than a laptop, air card and cell phone. We seek reporters who will
be comfortable traveling at least two and sometimes three weeks out of
every four...
While each correspondent will have a base, we envision only a light
presence, with no office, no formal staff, and a strong demand for work
in the field.
Covering just one country was easy enough -- why not a few countries all at once?
Responding to this sort of hand-wringing, Jack Shafer once commented that "[t]he closures of foreign bureaus and downsizing of Washington offices by
newspapers are much lamented by journalists, but how essential are they
in an age when any reader can call up on his screen free coverage by
the top U.S. dailies and the foreign press?" That doesn't do us much good when it's the top U.S. dailies that are scaling back their coverage, and when there's no indication that news organizations in other countries are going to pick up the slack.
And while there are plenty of non-Western countries with vibrant news media, this is generally not the case [PDF] -- and it's almost certainly not the case in those countries where skillful coverage is likely to be most valuable. For instance, the Observer adds that "[o]penings are available immediately for Pakistan, Afghanistan, and
Central Asia." After all, nothing particularly important ever happens in those parts...
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