In the face of heightened globalization and with the U.S. engaged in two wars, many mainstream news organizations have turned their backs on foreign news. Newspapers and television networks alike provide much less of it. Many outlets have shut- tered overseas bureaus. But a handful of promis- ing startups offer some hope for the future. Retreating from theWorld By Jodi Enda tori soper Former foreign correspondent Colin McMahon oversees the international news report for the Chicago Tribune and six other Tribune Co. newspapers. This arTiCle was Funded by a granT FroM The open soCieTy insTiTuTe. uring more than two decades at the Chicago to describe a modern, industrialized, assembly line approach to DTribune, Colin McMahon reported from bureaus in Mexico foreign (and sometimes national) news. And while the chain’s City, Moscow, Baghdad and Buenos Aires. He served as foreign particular method of providing identical pages for a variety of editor, directing a cadre of correspondents as they covered the papers might not be the national norm, its pared-down vision invasion of Iraq, the war in Afghanistan, the Palestinian upris- of foreign reporting is. ing. He was dispatched to Jerusalem for six months. It was Eighteen newspapers and two chains have shuttered every a heady life of globe-trotting that not only allowed him to be one of their overseas bureaus in the dozen years since AJR a witness to history, but to bring stories from the far corners first surveyed foreign coverage for the Project on the State of of the globe home to readers in America’s third-largest city, the American Newspaper (see “Goodbye, World,” November readers who live in Chicago’s distinctively ethnic neighbor- 1998). All but two of them eliminated their last bureau some- hoods, who often have intensely close ties to far-flung places time after 2003, the year the United States invaded Iraq and and who might not get such a rich diet of news—breaking or the last time AJR conducted the survey. Many other papers enterprise—were it not for Colin McMahon. and chains reduced their coterie of foreign correspondents, Now McMahon goes by the title of “national content editor.” meticulously choosing which bureaus to close. What’s more, an Once again he oversees the Tribune’s foreign news operation. untold number of regional and local papers have dramatically This time, however, McMahon does not direct a staff of foreign decreased the amount of foreign news they publish. Television correspondents. networks, meanwhile, slashed the time they devote to foreign The paper has none. news and narrowed their focus largely to war zones. The Chicago Tribune, like many other newspapers, elimi- Remarkably, NPR is the only mainstream media organiza- nated its storied foreign bureaus during the last decade’s tion that serves up a heartier foreign report, with more bureaus repeated rounds of belt tightening. Instead of overseeing and correspondents than in the past, to a chiefly American- reporters in the field and helping to shape articles that will based audience, according to the survey. While Bloomberg form a unique international report, McMahon runs a desk that News also has opened more foreign bureaus, a majority of the receives foreign and national stories from the Tribune’s larg- terminals where their stories appear are overseas. The “big est sister paper, the Los Angeles Times. His staff then picks four” national newspapers—the Wall Street Journal, New York some of those stories, edits them, trims them if need be and Times, Washington Post and Los Angeles Times—all continue places them alongside wire service reports to create nation/ to have vibrant foreign reports, though each has closed some world “modules” for the Chicago Tribune and six other Tribune foreign bureaus in recent years. Co. papers. As the mainstream media steadily retrench, a mix of start- “We take the content and we edit it here and add info- ups has stepped in to help fill the news vacuum. With fellow- boxes, graphics and other material,” McMahon explains. “So ships, grants and freelance contracts, new entries into the we are the central editing and design house for seven Tribune foreign-news business are providing alternatives for journal- Company newspapers. We send it fully designed. They drop ists intent on reporting from overseas, for editors who need it in.” to augment their reports and for readers looking to supple- Retreating Each day, McMahon feeds three to five foreign stories ment the now-limited offerings of newspapers and television in prefab modules to the Tribune, the Baltimore Sun, the stations. Orlando Sentinel and Fort Lauderdale’s Sun-Sentinel—all of There is no pretending they can completely make up for which used to have foreign bureaus—as well as the Hartford the formerly dynamic coverage in many national and regional Courant, the Morning Call in Allentown, Pennsylvania, and outlets. from the the Daily Press in Newport News, Virginia. Rarely do any of In closing all their outposts abroad, a number of news- those stories land on a front page. That would complicate the papers—most notably the Boston Globe, Newsday, the module. If he has big news, McMahon creates a refer, a poten- Philadelphia Inquirer and some Tribune Co. papers—put an tially sizable box that summarizes the story on page one and end to long, much heralded traditions of delivering foreign news World directs interested readers to the appropriate page inside. in their own way to their own readers, of covering patches of Modules. Content editor. Central editing and design house. the globe that their audiences had a particular, sometimes sin- tori soper Intentionally or not, Tribune Co. has hit upon the perfect words gular, interest in. They covered breaking news and big stories, Photography by Roy Karten and Tori soper Winter 2010 15 Retreating from the World to be sure. But, perhaps more often, correspondents from these that were not only interesting but also important—stories papers were ahead of the news or off it completely, telling sto- that might explain a culture or a country in ways that either ries about interesting people, places and customs that you just foretold or underscored key global developments in places like couldn’t read anywhere else. Pakistan, China or Congo. They had passports. They wandered. And they took their So when the Pulitzer family sold the Post-Dispatch and 13 readers with them. other newspapers to Lee Enterprises in 2005 (see “Lee Who?” Many editors say that kind of reporting was a luxury. Now, June/July 2005), Sawyer—fresh from reporting in the Middle with some noteworthy exceptions, it is a relic, gone the way East—decided to chart a new course. He asked Emily Rauh of paper tape and the pica pole. Unlike those artifacts of days Pulitzer, the wealthy widow of newspaper magnate Joseph past, foreign bureaus were not replaced by new technology. Pulitzer Jr., for seed money to allow him to build a program They were not replaced at all. that would support the kind of international stories the Post- Colin McMahon and his counterparts across the country Dispatch and other papers seldom would produce. have learned to make do. Rarely do they contend they are The idea, Sawyer says, was to help finance reporters—young doing more with less, the can-do mantra of the early years of Jon Sawyers, if you will—who would go overseas for weeks at budget cuts. They merely do the best they can. a time and produce in-depth projects for regional newspapers McMahon is one of the lucky ones. He has his pick of sto- and broadcast outlets. His hope, Sawyer says, was that once ries produced by L.A. Times foreign correspondents and relies reporters produced one or two such stories with help from out- less on wire services than his counterparts at many midsize side, they would be able to make the case that their employ- papers. He might not have his own staff of reporters, but most ers should pay for future projects themselves. In that way, the readers are unlikely to know the difference. It could be worse. money would have a ripple effect. “I’m happy with a lot of the things that we do,” McMahon Enter the nonprofit Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting says. “I’m happy with this approach. It’s easy for the reader (see “Funding for Foreign Forays,” February/March 2008). and it makes a lot of sense for the new reality. Sawyer is one of a handful of journalists trying to step into “I’m not happy with the new reality, though. I think this is the foreign news breach with inventive and varied upstarts. the best solution, but I wish it were 2004 again, when I was John Schidlovsky is another. He founded the nonprofit a foreign correspondent. I don’t think there’s anybody at this International Reporting Project to finance foreign reporting newspaper, including the editor, who wouldn’t want 13 foreign in 1998—when he began to witness what then was a gradual correspondents.” decline in international coverage—but has expanded and shifted the center’s course to meet the changing needs of jour- nalists. A newer addition to the mix is Philip Balboni, who in January 2009 launched GlobalPost, a for-profit Internet ven- ture that pays freelance reporters based overseas for regular submissions to its round-the-clock news report. (See “Foreign on Sawyer was less accepting of the “new reality.” Affairs,” April/May 2008.) JSawyer had long been the Washington bureau chief for the None of these endeavors replicates the old model of hiring St. Louis Post-Dispatch, but he made his name reporting and reporters, paying them a living wage, providing them ben- writing major projects from distant shores.