The foreign desk in transition

Photo: John Vink / Magnum photos Editors Note: This story is a chapter in The New Global Journalism: Foreign Correspondence in Transition, a report from Columbia Universitys Tow Center for Digital Journalism.

When The Washington Posts new owner, Jeff Bezos, met the newsroom for the first time in September of 2013, he mentioned two recent Post stories that hed found particularly intriguing.

The first was a human-interest feature on the death of a 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 Posts foreign affairs blog, headlined 9 questions about Syria you were too embarrassed to ask.

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 arent 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. Whats happening in Syria is really important, but it can also be confusing and difficult to follow even for those of us glued to it.

Even without the newsroom plug from Bezos, 9 questions was already grabbing attention inside and outside the Post. 9 questions got over three million pageviews on WorldViews, the foreign news blog that is one of the papers main experiments in international digital journalism. Compare that to the potential audience for a top international story in the print newspaper: About 475,000 subscribers receive it, and on a good day a single foreign desk article might get another 100,000 pageviews 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, its a piece of the hybrid that is foreign news reporting today at the Post and other mainstream organizations committed to serious international coverage.

In at least two legacy newsrooms, The Washington Post and The New York Times, journalists who dont leave the office are daily contributors to the foreign report, aggregating, curating, and yes, doing original reportingfor WorldViews at the Post, and for The New York Times Open Source column by Robert Mackey.

Their varied labelsblog, columnhint 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 medias 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 one depends on factors that foreign desks didnt have to worry about in the past: Can they draw a strong, sustainable audience? And can they play a part in resolving the economic crisis that has caused so many mainstream organizations to axe their foreign bureaus?

Shuttered bureaus

Between 1998 and 2011, at least 20 US newspapers and other media outlets eliminated all their foreign bureaus, according to American Journalism Review (ajr). Elsewhere, the number and size of those bureaus of have shrunk dramatically.

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The foreign desk in transition