Introduction

by Ann Cooper and Taylor Owen

Throughout the twentieth century the core proposition of foreign correspondence was to bear witness–to go places where the audience couldn’t and report back on what occurred. Foreign correspondents have long been our interpreters of global events.

Three interrelated trends now challenge this position. First, citizens living through events can tell the world about them directly via a range of digital technologies, without the need for the journalist intermediaries who were essential in the past to report and distribute the news. Second, journalists have the ability to report on some events, particularly breaking news, without physically being there–by immersing themselves in streams of content, whether live video feeds from cell phones, Twitter feeds, or blog posts. Finally, the financial pressures that digital technology have brought to legacy news media have forced many to close their international bureaus. Scores of the traditional foreign correspondents who worked in those bureaus have moved on to other careers, or to new jobs at digitally native media.

In this age of post-legacy media, local reporters, activists, ordinary citizens–and traditional foreign correspondents–are all now using digital technologies to inform the world of breaking news, and to offer analysis and opinions on global trends. In 2012, calling the nontraditional forms of coverage they identified The New Global Journalism.¹

The new practices require new skills. The population of experts who report and comment on the news has expanded to include eyewitnesses who can film, or photograph, or write about events and post their work immediately online. Verifying the authenticity of these digital sources has become an important part of the skillset for international reporting.

Also newly important is the ability to do immersion social-media reporting. And in this new age of government surveillance, traditional correspondents and new digital reporters must train themselves to use security tools that will keep their work and their sources secure.

In late 2013 the Tow Center gathered several practitioners and students of the new global journalism for a discussion of this changing world. A theme quickly emerged: that “being there,” meaning the hallowed belief that foreign correspondence had to come directly from the eyewitness reporter on the ground, was no longer the only reliable source for reporting from abroad.

In fact, there have always been stories that foreign correspondents have had to find a way to report on without actually “being there.” China’s government, for years, refused to accredit foreign correspondents, so Western news organizations set up listening posts in Hong Kong. Still today, North Korea’s highly restrictive regime forces news organizations to cover the country from South Korea. Similarly, government restrictions or the high level of physical danger have forced correspondents at times to cover conflicts in Somalia, Nagorno-Karabakh, Syria, and other hot spots from neighboring outposts.

These solutions are limiting and unsatisfying, but in this digital age it’s far more possible to do reliable reporting and good analysis without always being on location. A hybrid reporting project like the site Tehran Bureau, based in London and described by its founder in this report, can add depth to our understanding–particularly when reporting on authoritarian regimes.

The digital journalist uses a host of new electronic sources, tools, and practices that are now part of the global reporting landscape. Digital journalists would argue that in the right circumstances, these tools enable them to offer as clear and informed a report as what the journalist on the ground can produce–sometimes even clearer, because they may have access to a broader spectrum of material than a field reporter.

In mainstream newsrooms, though, there is still significant skepticism about digital’s impact on foreign reporting. Many see it as the end of the era when a reporter could spend a full day–or days or weeks–reporting in the field before sitting down to write.

That traditional foreign correspondent model served audiences well, bringing them vivid accounts of breaking news and nuanced analysis of longer-term developments.

At the Tow Center, we believe that both forms of reporting are vital, that both are necessary to help all of us understand the world. A goal of this report is to narrow or eliminate the divide between the two, and in this spirit we lay out several objectives.

First, our authors work to provide a clear picture of this new reporting landscape: Who are the primary actors, and what does the ecosystem of journalists, citizens, sources, tools, practices, and challenges look like?

Second, we urge managers at both mainstream and digital native media outlets to embrace both kinds of reporting, melding them into a new international journalism that produces stories with greater insight.

Third, we hope to show the strengths in traditional and digital foreign reporting techniques, with a goal of defining a hybrid foreign correspondent model–not a correspondent who can do everything, but one open to using all reporting tools and a wide range of sources.

Finally, we outline governance issues in this new space–legal and operational–with an aim to help journalists report securely and independently in this digital age.

We approach these issues through five chapters, whose authors include journalists from both digital-native and mainstream media, as well as a communications scholar and a media producer for a human rights organization. While each writes from a different vantage, the overlapping insights and conclusions begin to redefine both the edges and heart of international reportage now.