Shuttered Bureaus
A report published by the American Journalism Review (AJR) in 2011 found that at least twenty U.S. newspapers and other media outlets had eliminated all of their foreign bureaus since AJR first conducted a similar census in 1998.53 And even in traditional U.S. newsrooms that continue to maintain foreign bureaus around the world, the number and size have shrunk dramatically in recent years.
Among newspapers, the Wall Street Journal still has the largest international reporting division, with correspondents in forty-nine countries, followed by the New York Times with reporters in twenty countries. Wire services are much larger. The Associated Press maintains bureaus in seventy-nine countries,54 while Bloomberg has correspondents in seventy-three countries.55
That’s down from a time, fifteen years or so ago, when the paper kept twenty bureaus staffed across the globe. But the international staff is no longer limited to correspondents based in foreign bureaus. In the mid-2000s, as many newsrooms sought new ways to engage online audiences, the Post hired videojournalist Travis Fox for a new kind of Web-only foreign reporting–new at least for a traditional newspaper.
Fox traveled around the world producing long, feature-length pieces for the Web.56 His stories were fully reported, beautifully shot videos. Such work is costly to sustain, though, and like many other print organizations experimenting with video, the Post determined the cost was not yielding the advertising or the online audience it had expected. After Fox’s departure in December of 2010, wire services became the main source of video for foreign stories on the Post’s website, with some contributions from the paper’s own correspondents in the field.