The Digital Natives

The statistics on closings of traditional foreign bureaus are grim, but they do not tell the whole story of foreign news coverage. While mainstream bureaus have closed, digitally native sites like GlobalPost have filled some of the gap. GlobalPost was created in 2009 to cover international news for a largely U.S. audience, with sixty-five full-time or freelance correspondents filing regularly from around the world.

Over the past year or so, at least three other digital natives launched expansions into foreign news coverage: Huffington Post, BuzzFeed, and VICE, each of which has hired journalists whose role looks a lot like that of a traditional foreign correspondent.

Perhaps the most surprising of these newcomers is BuzzFeed, a site once known primarily for features such as “The 30 Most Important Cats of 2010.” BuzzFeed’s newly minted commitment to covering hard news from around the world has already made it a competitor, with in-depth international reporting from Caracas, Kiev, and other 2014 hot spots. With more than 160-million unique visitors, BuzzFeed is among the top ten mostvisited news websites in the United States, though it’s not clear how many of those visitors are reading the international dispatches. In mainstream newsrooms some have treated the site’s foray into foreign reporting with a certain disdain.

Peter Preston, former longtime editor of The Guardian, is one skeptic. “There’s nothing wrong with angles, twists, listicles,” he wrote in The Guardian. “If they encourage readers, that’s great. If they make money, that’s great too. But they are not salvation for battling reporters in the depths of Africa, doing stories that matter to them and their communities.”⁷⁵

Preston’s critique makes BuzzFeed’s foreign desk sound almost as frivolous as its cat videos. It’s not. When it announced it would cover foreign news, the site hired respected ex-Guardian Moscow correspondent Miriam Elder, who then recruited reporters to cover Egypt, Syria, Russia, Ukraine, and other current news centers. Following a fresh fifty million-dollar investment in August, Buzzfeed has said it plans to open offices in Japan, All of this begins to sound like new media copying legacy media–at the same time that legacy foreign desks are trying to adapt to the new world of digital. “I’m not sure there is much difference–at the end of the day, the reporting we do is a lot more traditional than I think a lot of people would expect,” Miriam Elder told me. “It’s about making and meeting sources, making phone calls, finding the news, breaking the news.”

There are fundamental differences, of course. BuzzFeed began life as a purveyor of viral entertainment, and fluff and sensation still dominate its homepage (you’re far more likely to access its international reporting from your social feeds). But as a digital native, BuzzFeed definitely has an edge in solving the biggest conundrum in the new world of journalism: How do you attract an audience?

Social-friendly headlines are one key to audience engagement. The Post and other mainstream newsrooms are still catching up to BuzzFeed, Upworthy, and other digital natives that know how to maximize clicks and shares with head-turning headlines. The Post now shares detailed visual presentations with national and international correspondents,⁷⁶ to show how lead-ins that read like social headlines can grab attention.⁷⁷(“Headlines are the new nut grafs” is a line we hear frequently at digital workshop sessions for our reporters.)

Also key to answering how to attract an audience is the need to rethink the traditional U.S. newspaper definition of audience. With few exceptions, papers were local institutions, serving the community where they published. The Internet lets us reach well beyond traditional print circulation areas, but it doesn’t tell us how best to do that. “If we are going to continue to expand our readership, as we must do in a digital world, growing those national and international audience will be crucial to our success,” said Jehl, the Post’s foreign editor.

Again, digital natives like BuzzFeed may have, at least, a psychological advantage in their instinctively conscious understanding that audiences are now global. That’s led BuzzFeed to a new approach in assigning beats. Globalization and the Internet mean that “someone who lives in an urban center in Russia or Uruguay or Vietnam can have more in common with each other than with other people in their own countries,” said Elder. So instead of making all foreign beats based on geography, Elder has created some “thematic beats,” like international women’s rights. Women’s correspondent Jina Moore literally travels the world to write about how women became players in Rwanda’s politics,⁷⁸ about Brazil’s decision to pay reparations for maternal death,⁷⁹ and about abuse in Iraqi prisons.⁸⁰

The thematic approach is key to engaging a broad global audience, said BuzzFeed deputy foreign editor Paul Hamilos, in an interview with Journalism.co.uk. “You’re not going to grow a news organization if you only think of your English language readers in your home country,” he said.⁸¹

In the “good old days,” mainstream outlets like the New York Times and the Washington Post set the agenda for foreign news in the United States. In the digital era, their authority as agenda setters is shared with others, and some of the digital natives may end up showing them important new paradigms for foreign reporting.

The newcomers still have a lot to prove, though. Their commitment to news, unlike that of mainstream media, is a new phenomenon. Will they still be in the foreign news business a decade from now? It’s hard to say–just as it’s impossible to predict the shape of the traditional newsroom’s foreign desk ten years down the road.