Defining the Future

As a digital foreign editor for the Washington Post, one of my roles is to encourage and guide our foreign correspondents in the pivot toward digital-first journalism. Earlier this year, when Will Englund was covering the Maidan anti-government protests in Ukraine, we asked him to capture some video from the scene.

Englund is sixty-one and has a Pulitzer Prize for investigative reporting. He and Lally, his wife, shared the Moscow bureau job at the time, which included covering the unrest in Ukraine. Englund had done video before from Nagorno Karabakh, a long-running conflict dating back to the Soviet era, but he was far from an experienced videographer.⁶⁷ In Kiev, he used a Canon point-and-shoot camera that the Post gives to all of its foreign correspondents. It helped, he said, that the Maidan protests were “always extremely photogenic.” He filed the audio recording of his narration separately, and the sound and images were put together by one of the dozens of video editors the Post has hired in recent years to boost its online video presence. Englund’s video from Kiev conveyed the Lally and Englund, who now work as Post editors in Washington, both became important contributors to WorldViews while they worked overseas. Still, both miss the “good old days” of traditional newspaper foreign correspondence. “It can be satisfying to be quick with a story, but it’s not terribly rewarding,” said Englund. “And being enslaved by the Web hugely reduces our ability to explore and dig and do the other acts essential to quality journalism.”

Englund suggested that the Post leave more international breaking news coverage to wire service reports, giving the paper’s foreign correspondents time to explore deeper stories.

“I believe the Post would be more valuable, and readable, if it moved away from hourly hard news, rather than trying to stay on top of it,” he said.

The debate on the shape of the mainstream foreign desk in the digital era is an ongoing one. Right now, the Post and other newsrooms are working with a hybrid blend of traditional correspondents and in-house bloggers, urging them to cooperate and complement each other’s work to create a fresh, constantly updated foreign report. But even with the increased U.S. and international audience drawn by WorldViews, it’s impossible to say whether this formula–or something not yet tried–will be the longterm foreign-desk model.

A recent move at the New York Times signaled a rethinking of the blog approach there.

The paper has ended or merged more than half of its blogs this year, including two with an international focus: India Ink and The Lede. India Ink was less than three years old and relied on freelance contributions, as well as postings by the paper’s correspondents in the country. The Lede often focused on breaking international stories. Those are now being covered in a new feature called Open Source, written by Robert Mackey, who previously wrote The Lede.⁶⁸ Open Source is akin to a blog, though it is not identified in the directory as one,⁶⁹ and Mackey’s reporting for it draws on social media updates from Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube videos.

In an interview in June, Times assistant managing editor Ian Fisher said, “We’re going to continue to provide bloggy content with a more conversational tone. We’re just not going to do [it] as much in standard reverse-chronological blogs.”⁷⁰ The Times’ change may reflect a growing trend: that most digital readers find content through search and social, rather than by seeking out the homepage of dedicated platforms. Yet, even digitally native publications such as Quartz⁷¹ and Buzzfeed⁷² have launched features focused on India, and the Wall Street Journal continues to maintain several of its international blogs, including ones that report on China⁷³ and India.⁷⁴

These blog experiments are reminders that much in the world of digital media remains just that: experimentation. They are also evidence of just how much international reporting has evolved–from an era only a few years ago when the emphasis was on rich, resource-intensive multimedia storytelling, to a time when newsrooms are struggling to find less costly ways of engaging a wider audience to meet their advertising goals.