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^{More Windows on the World}
Nouveau foreign correspondents’ tastes range from wine to war

By Joe Strupp

The fierce, Far East battle was among the most intense in recent memory, and Peter Landers was all over it. When The Wall Street Journal correspondent joined the Tokyo bureau just one year ago, he immediately began covering the conflict as each side attacked and counterattacked, sought out its rival's weaknesses, and strategized for the one advantage that would lead to victory.

During the maneuvers, Landers carefully made connections with combatants in both camps, laying the groundwork for an insider’s view of the warfare. When the fighting ended in June, Landers had enough for a Page One story detailing what had occurred, and, more important, why. “It took time to get interviews with some of the key people, but it was worth it,” Landers recalls. “My story was the inside story of what happened.”

So what did happen? A border dispute between North and South Korea? A skirmish involving the forces of China and Taiwan? No, the factions in this struggle for power were Nippon Telegraph and Telephone (the AT&T of Japan) and London-based Cable and Wireless PLC (C&W), both of whom were battling for control of International Digital Communications Inc., a major Japanese telecommunications company. In the end, C&W won out.

Landers' story is typical of the kind of foreign "conflicts" U.S. newspapers have been focusing on more in recent years as correspondents witness the most significant change since the end of World War II in the kind of news they must cover. After decades of focusing on the U.S.-Soviet power battle, political upheavals from Iran to El Salvador, and the threat of nuclear war, international news today routinely leads with the latest financial market swings, European currency fluctuations, and the newest merger of a U.S. corporation with an Asian partner.

Add to that a new emphasis on foreign cultural stories (religion, entertainment, food and wine), in-depth analyses pegged to breaking news, and anecdotal accounts of daily life in other societies — and it's apparent that the international section of most daily newspapers has been almost completely refocused.

"There has been a huge, tectonic shift in the past 10 years," says Andrew Rosenthal, foreign editor of The New York Times whose overseas experience includes a late-1980s stint in Moscow. "The intersection between politics and business has become a player on foreign policy and coverage."

How stories are covered also has changed dramatically since 1990, according to veteran reporters who remember passing a phone around among colleagues so they could dictate stories halfway around the world or battling for a shot at a Telex machine that enabled them to tap out stories word by word. With links to the Internet and satellite connections as close as a pocket phone or handheld computer, most overseas correspondents today can send a story or log on a Web site within seconds from locations as open as a Saudi Arabian desert or as secluded as a Chechen foxhole.

"The ability to get the story out is incredible," says Kathy Gannon, a veteran Associated Press foreign correspondent who says a satellite-linked phone and laptop computer allowed her to cover the December hijacking of an Indian Airlines flight form an airport runway in Kandahar, Afghanistan, where the plane was stranded with more than 100 hostages.

"I could file pictures, quotes, and color stories while sitting on the Tarmac just yards from the plane," she says. "There were no other phones around, and we were not allowed to leave, so I would not have been able to do it any other way."

It's a small world, after all

Paul Nussbaum has had it drilled into his head for years that readers want local news more than anything. But while Nussbaum, The Philadelphia Inquirer's foreign editor, agrees that stories on the latest school budget cuts and garbage rate increases are tops, he says international news is creeping up in popularity.

"People find themselves linked through family, economy, and their companies to foreign countries," says Nussbaum, who overseas four foreign bureaus. "It is one thing that readers are looking for more and more."

A 1998 Inquirer reader survey ranked foreign news third in popularity among respondents, with 59% saying they were highly interested in such coverage. That was topped only by local news, at 81%, and national news, at 70%.

Readers showed less interest in sports, household finance, local politics, government, and entertainment, according to the poll. Similar polls at other papers such as The Boston Globe also ranked foreign news second or third behind local coverage — and rising.

"What has changed is the common wisdom that American readers are no longer interested in the rest of the world," says Simon Li, foreign editor of the Los Angeles Times since 1995. "There is more news about globalization and the fact that U.S. companies are more affected by business decisions in other countries. There is a real changing role of the United States around the world."

Most observers date the shift from political and military news to financial and business news to the 1991 end of the Cold War and the rise of investment in European and Asian trade that followed. Others say foreign coverage has grown due to increased immigration.

"We have more people here form Asian and Latin American countries than ever before, and they have a more-than-average interest in where the come from," says Nils Bruzelus, foreign editor of The Boston Globe, which has six foreign bureaus and plans to open a seventh, in Africa, later this year. "We now have a large Brazilian population that we never had and a growing Vietnam readership."

John Bussey, foreign editor of The Wall Street Journal — which has more foreign bureaus, 37, than any other U.S. newspaper — agrees. He says the tidal wave of change from political to economic news is still taking shape.

"Before the end of the Cold War, it was all military and Kremlinization," says Bussey, a former Tokyo and Hong Kong correspondent. "It's now economic and business. The Asian financial crisis has created huge social chaos."

The Journal has taken advantage of the growing foreign news interest and financial expansion. Since 1990, the Dow Jones & Co. Inc.-owned financial daily has:

• Expanded the foreign news hole from six to 12 columns each day.
  

• Increased its China staff from one to five reporters, and expanded its Latin America staff from three to eight reporters.
  

• Increased the number of Page One foreign stories from three or five a week to two or three a day.
  

• Doubled its number of special reports on global investing, from one to two yearly.
  

• Created European and Asian editions of the daily paper, with 12 new reporters and a redesign for the European edition in 1999.

But growing financial news is not the only reason for more reader interest in foreign news. Some editors say the end of the U.S.-Soviet rivalry and nuclear missile showdowns requires news organizations to look more closely at other international issues and smaller conflicts in places such as Kosovo, Ireland, and East Timor.

"The Kosovo war showed that interest in foreign news is very, very high," says Robert McCartney, foreign editor of The Washington Post. "There is less of a sense of urgency in global coverage, so people are more interested in these smaller stories. We have readers with a growing interest in West Africa and South America. With [recent trends in] immigration, foreign news is more vital than ever."

Deployment dilemmas

With the expanded interest in foreign news — accompanied by a dramatic swelling in the ranks of U.S. foreign correspondents since 1990 — comes new uncertainties about how best to staff bureaus outside the country in an age when newspapers continue to battle growing competition and cost-cutting demands. While the market is ripe for more international coverage, editors disagree over the best and most cost-effective way to use correspondents around the world.

Some, such as The Washington Post and The Wall Street Journal, have consistently added foreign correspondents and bureaus since 1990, with the Journal nearly doubling its overseas staff — from 70 to 134 — in the past five years.

"The two biggest changes are that we added a bureau in Africa and South America [since 1990] and an economics reporter for those areas," says McCartney of the Post. "Those areas of the world have risen in importance."

The Post also plans to relocate veteran correspondent Bill Drozdiak from Berlin to Brussels this summer to focus solely on financial news. The change is one of several in which writers are being sent overseas specifically to cover economic stories.

Other recent examples include:

• The Boston Globe adding a Moscow-based stringer devoted to financial news, with half the cost covered through the paper's business section.
  

• The Associated Press adding business writers to its German and Mexico Bureaus, while also launching a special Monday series on international economic issues.
  

• The New York Times creating a new Eastern Hemisphere economics beat later this year based in New York that will focus on a wide variety of foreign financial news.

"You have to make some real decisions about how to have a good mix of financial stuff with other stuff," says Rosenthal of the Times. "We've had to do some real soul-searching over what to do in Asia. We have three people in Tokyo and four in China, but only one covering everything else in Asia."

Some newspapers known for their strong foreign reporting, including the Los Angeles Times and Chicago Tribune, have been hesitant to add reporters too quickly and have had to move assignments around to match the shifting news focus.

"My publishers have never stinted in their support of foreign coverage, but there is — in day-do-day decisions — much more of a struggle for a foreign story to justify its existence," says Li of the Los Angeles Times, which closed three bureaus in 1995, but still ranks third among U.S. newspapers with 22 foreign offices. "We've been called on to justify things that once were taken for granted. The bar is set higher."

At the Tribune, budget concerns forced the recent shutdown of the paper's bureau in New Delhi, India, dropping its foreign count to nine bureaus.

The Baltimore Sun, meanwhile, has yet to reopen bureaus in Mexico City, Berlin, and Tokyo that were closed in 1995 and 1996 for cost-cutting reasons, leaving the paper with five foreign bureaus.

"It was part of a rearrangement that resulted in a net reduction of bureaus," says Sun Foreign Editor Jeff Price. "Tokyo was costing an enormous amount of money, and we felt the readers were best served in the remaining bureaus in London, Johannesburg, Jerusalem, Moscow, and Beijing."

What's the story?

When Larry Rohter first covered Brazil as a Newsweek correspondent in 1980, human-rights violations, death squads, and military dictatorship stories were the order of the day. Today, as a Brazil-based writer for The New York Times, Rohter's recent stories have included conflicts over funding for government social programs, traditional vs. pagan beliefs in the local Catholic Church, and the devaluing of the Brazilian currency.

"It has been more of a focus on the real people and their daily problems," says Rohter, who spoke to E&P from a hotel room in bogota, Columbia, where he was reporting on local drug wars. "One of the stories I did last year was on the Women's World Cup and why women's soccer is not big in Brazil. We got a ton of mail on it."

Rohter's changing focus of coverage is not unique.

Other vets, such as Marjorie Miller of the Los Angeles Times' London bureau, also feel the shifting wave of change. Miller, who cut her journalistic teeth as a Central America correspondent for the Times in 1985., went from covering El Salvador battlefields and Mexican earthquakes 10 years ago to writing about a new London Ferris wheel and British author Helen Fielding.

"You are writing about a new opera house one day and, maybe, Northern Ireland peace talks the next," says Miller, 43, who is married to a free-lance writer and has two children. "In some ways, it was easier in the past because you had something, like a war, to focus on. Now you have to look around and cover a greater variety of stories."

Clar Ni Chonghaile, an AP writer in Paris, agrees. A former reporter for Reuters who has stationed in Madrid and London before reaching the City of Lights, she says the growing emphasis on economic news and broader reader interest forces overseas reporters to expand their focus.

"When you are dealing with the European economy, you cannot look at each individual nation separately," says Ni Chonghaile, 27. "The vision of Europe is of a collective financial group, and the drive is on for those stories.

Wired for news

At AP — the 152-year-old news cooperative that boasts 95 overseas bureaus and serves 1,700 newspapers nationwide — more foreign economic news also is being written, but with a continued emphasis on the breaking story.

The spot report is constant, and it has to be, but the story also includes variety," says Tom Kent, AP deputy managing editor. "We are seeing a lot of issues that are more complicated, though, and you have to look more deeply into some of these issues in smaller countries."

Kent adds that AP is being asked to provide more analysis and in-depth coverage to customers, while also beefing up its own business coverage and daily story production.

At United Press International, which has undergone serious financial problems in the past few years, foreign coverage was cut back to a stringer-only approach last year when veteran foreign correspondent Arnaud de Borchgrave took over as president and CEO. The former Newsweek Paris bureau chief and Washington Times editor wasted no time in closing UPI's nine foreign bureaus in 1999, replacing them with writers under contract in 50 cities.

"I always felt it was a waste of money to keep a bureau open where people gossip more than they cover news," says de Brochgrave, who shut down seven bureaus while at The Washington Times in the late 1980s. "The average reader is looking for quality of content, not a byline."

Bringing it home

Most larger papers, such as the Los Angeles Times, New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and Washington Post, want their reporters to get stories differing from AP or UPI accounts, editors say. While they maintain that wire services can give a good basic news story on events, they still believe their readers need a targeted report or an in-depth sidebar tailored to local readership.

"The AP correspondent has a thousand masters and has to write for morning and afternoon papers, and cover every major story there," says McCartney of the Post. "Our correspondent can focus on the one big thing we are interested in."

The Philadelphia Inquirer's Nussbaum agrees, saying "our people still provide the foundation of our coverage — the wires pick up the slack.

But providing analysis and in-depth coverage is only one trademark of today's foreign correspondents. For many U.S.-based newspapers or chains, the only thing they want from their "man in Moscow" is a story related to their "reader in Redding."

"Our philosophy is to be intensely parochial if we need to be," says Andrew Alexander, Washington bureau chief of Cox Newspapers, which operates 16 dailies and six foreign bureaus. "We are constantly on the lookout for stories that connect only with our readers." Alexander cited examples ranging from the Atlanta Journal-Constitution's coverage of a false health scare in Belgium for Atlanta-based Coca-Cola to the Dayton (Ohio) Daily News reporting on the opening of a General Motors plant in China — and its potential impact on Dayton's own G.M. facility.

At USA Today, which has doubled its foreign bureaus from two to four in just the last months, international coverage is specifically tailored for a broad U.S. audience.

Deputy Managing Editor Mark Memmott says international stories must have a news peg that interests readers from Alaska to Arkansas.

"We focus on explaining the global village to readers who are savvy, but do not have to pay attention to every detail," says Memmott. "We try to go beyond the standard wars and refugees to stories about how issues in the United States such as the death penalty, abortion, or campaign scandals are dealt with overseas."