The Foreign Desk in Transition:A Hybrid Approach to Reporting From There-and Here

When the Washington Post’s new owner, Jeff Bezos, met the newsroom for the first time in October of 2013, he spent more than an hour fielding questions from a staff curious to gauge the Amazon founder’s plans for the one hundred thirty seven-year-old newspaper. During the session, Bezos mentioned two recent Post stories that he found particularly intriguing.

The first was a human-interest feature on the death of a bar bouncer, the kind of richly descriptive narrative that has been a Post hallmark for decades. But Bezos’ other favorite was something of a surprise: a 2,800-word piece published in the Post’s foreign affairs blog, headlined “9 questions about Syria you were too embarrassed to ask.”⁴⁹

Conceived and reported in Washington by a Post digital journalist, and written for an online audience, the Syria piece addressed readers in a conversational tone rarely, if ever, used in traditional foreign reporting. If you “aren’t exactly sure why Syria is fighting a civil war, or even where Syria is located,” wrote blogger Max Fisher, “this is the article for you.” No need to feel embarrassed, he continued. “What’s happening in Syria is really important, but it can also be confusing and difficult to follow even for those of us glued to it.”⁵⁰

Even without the newsroom plug from Bezos, “⁵¹ questions” was already grabbing attention inside and outside the Post. In the two months after it first appeared on WorldViews, the blog that is one of the paper’s main experiments in international digital journalism, “⁵² questions” got over five-million page views. Compare that to the potential audience for a top international story in the printed newspaper: About 475,000 subscribers receive it, and on a good day it might get another 100,000 page views online.

So, is “9 questions” the future of international news: breezy, digital-first, and written by someone in an office thousands of miles from the scene? Perhaps the best answer is, it’s a piece of the hybrid that is foreign news reporting today at the Post and other mainstream organizations committed to serious international coverage.

Traditional foreign correspondents remain at the heart of that hybrid, filing vivid, detailed, firsthand reporting from the field. Now, they also fill frequent online updates on major breaking news. But in-house journalists who don’t leave the office are also a part of the foreign report. In at least two legacy newsrooms, the Washington Post and the New York Times, these digital journalists are daily contributors, aggregating, curating, and yes, doing original reporting–for WorldViews at the Post, and for the New York Times’ Open Source column by Robert Mackey and Watching Syria’s War. I am a digital foreign editor at the Post, where we call WorldViews a blog. The Times labels Open Source a column, while the URL for Watching Syria’s War uses the term project. The varied labels give some hint at the uncertainty that hangs over traditional foreign desks in this transitional age. Each of those digital features offers interesting, innovative reporting. Each is part of mainstream’s push to expand international reporting beyond the traditional foreign-correspondent model and appeal to more online readers. But whether these new models will prove as durable as the traditional correspondent depends on factors that foreign desks didn’t have to worry about in the past: Can they draw a strong, sustainable audience? And can they play a part in solving the economic crisis that has caused so many mainstream organizations to axe their foreign bureaus?