(Michael P. Smith)

It is time to re-invent foreign coverage. My argument takes a while. So bear with me.

When a newspaper decides to reduce the number or eliminate foreign correspondents - as the Boston Globe did recently - we invariably get questions about foreign coverage.

Frequently the questions sound like this - our paper is thinking about closing the Paris bureau and we were wondering what readers think about foreign news. My first reaction is, "What!? You still have a Paris bureau? That’s a job I want." I am reminded of a talk I had with Ben Bradlee when he was writing his memoir "A Good Life." His eyes twinkled when he talked of his time in Paris. He conjured up images of a trench-coated reporter making notes in a café on the Left Bank. I know that is a much romanticized image of a correspondent, especially given the often gritty and difficult conditions many journalists working overseas endure. Yet my bet is many journalists dream of being a foreign correspondent. I know there is a core of journalism students who share that ambition.

The perception of that glamorous journalism job probably hurts foreign news coverage more than folks would admit. I can imagine that within the walls of newspaper companies - when budgets are being cussed and discussed - that there are many who see being posted overseas as a luxury they can no longer afford. Even if overseas is a hut in Afghanistan. Even when it is cheaper to fly to San Jose, Costa Rica, than it is to fly to San Jose, California.

We can appeal to national pride, security and public interest. Writing the "Demise of the Foreign Correspondent" in the Feb. 18 Washington Post, staff writer Pamela Constable made a strong argument for foreign coverage:

"Today, Americans' need to understand the struggles of distant peoples is greater than ever. Our troops are fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan, countries that we did not know enough about when we invaded them and that we are still trying to fathom. We have been victimized by foreign terrorists, yet we still cannot imagine why anyone would hate us. Our economy is intimately linked to global markets, our population is nearly 20 percent foreign-born, and our lives are directly affected by borderless scourges such as global warming and AIDS. Knowing about the world is not a luxury; it is an urgent necessity."

She cited data that included "between 2002 and 2006, the number of foreign-based newspaper correspondents shrank from 188 to 141 (excluding the Wall Street Journal, which publishes Asian and European editions)." My guess is that number would be smaller if America were not at war.

Even when I try to help my callers mount a strong defense for foreign news, it is hard for me to justify the expense of someone living abroad when so many resources are needed back home to help newspapers in print and online stay healthy. So much of the future success of newspaper companies depends on their localness. So I coach my callers not to let the bosses make absolute statements like, "no one reads international news," "everyone gets their foreign news off the Internet," or "young people do not care about international news." Our research and common sense prove that those statements are questionable.

Starting with The Power to Grow Readership and the Impact Study, I point out that the original eight imperatives suggest there is a need for international news. The Impact Study made it clear that readers want and expect a wide variety of content from their newspapers, but that there are topics that, if newspapers did a better job with them, overall readership of the newspaper would increase (not just of those topics).

Three of the nine content areas speak directly to foreign news:

• Intensely local, people focused news. At first blush this does not appear to be about foreign news, but key to this content area is the idea that readers want to read about the lives of ordinary people - how they get by, what they do, what their lives are like.
  
• How we are governed and global relations. This includes coverage of politics, government, war and international conflicts. The Impact Study said readers want more of these stories - not fewer - but they wanted them written in what our researchers called the feature-style approach. The study also suggested that newspapers would be more successful if they packaged these stories in a stand-alone section, include more maps and more photos.
  
• Science, technology and environment. The Impact Study called for more of these stories, but with an international twist to them. This is one area of the study that asked for longer, more complex stories also written in a feature-style approach.

When our research for growing readership appears to contradict the behavior of the company, I point to the work of Douglas McGill. He was a foreign correspondent for 10 years in Europe and Asia and is currently the executive director of The World Press Institute at Macalester College in St. Paul. Between his years overseas and becoming the WPI director, McGill was helping explore a new approach to foreign coverage, which he calls "glocalism." To oversimplify, it is a global story told from a local community perspective.

This idea is not new. John Maxwell Hamilton, the dean of the Manship School of Journalism at Louisiana State University, compiled a book in 1988 called "Main Street America and the Third World" (Seven Locks Press). I cannot find my copy but, if memory serves, Hamilton featured the works of several newspapers and showed that there are vivid international connections woven through almost every community in America. His premise was that global connections could be covered from Main Street America.

Reaching beyond that idea, Doug McGill has created a movement. In a 2003 speech at Poynter, titled "How to Globalize Your Local Newspaper," he talked about the connections between the Impact Study and his reporting. He began telling global stories from his community before the Readership Institute was launched, but has since found support for his work in our research. From his Web site, www.mcgillreport.org, he explains glocalism:

1. Journalism that illuminates the invisible strands of mutual influence connecting every town and city to the rest of the world. Glocal journalism exposes the local effects of global causes, the local reactions to global actions, the local opportunities of global trends, the local threats of global dangers, and the love of local and global neighbors.
   
2. Journalism that uses freedom of the press in the U.S. to help people elsewhere in the world who don't have it. Journalists in the U.S. can often write better stories about the politics and society of foreign countries, simply because they don't fear a knock on the door at night. At the same time, thanks to the Internet, these stories can be extremely useful in those countries because they will be read and exchanged and widely distributed.
   
3. Journalism that defines the largest relevant and useful context for every local story. In a globalized world that context is usually global whether the story is the weather, a flu outbreak, fishing in the Mississippi, or the insanely low price of sneakers at Wal-Mart.

Fortunately for those of us who teach journalism and storytelling, his work is archived in chronological order. I have spent many days reading and re-reading his articles. I have three favorites:

The Coffee Shop Warriors of Minnesota-Somalia
At a Minneapolis Starbucks, members of different Somali tribes gather daily to "fadhi ku dirir," which means "to fight while sitting down."
The Uighurs and the War on Terror
An interview with an Uighur immigrant living in Minnesota, as a refugee of ethnic cleansing in Western China.
A Very Sudanese Christmas
Refugees of the Sudan civil war celebrate Christmas at a southern Minnesota hunting lodge.

To assuage the impression that McGill has traded sitting in a Left Bank café with sitting in a Twin Cities coffee shop and called it international reporting, he is eager to point out that glocal journalism involves more than listening to immigrants. That is a start. People have great stories to tell. It includes reporting, holding people accountable and getting reactions from governments.

He explained in an email to me:

My biggest example of that is my breaking the story of the genocide of the Anuak people. These are stories I wrote over a period of several years (and still write from time to time). While working from my attic office in Rochester, Minnesota, I literally broke the news that the Ethiopian government is attempting to wipe out an entire black African tribe that lives in western Ethiopia. The basic story is that about 1,500 members of the Anuak tribe live as refugees in southern Minnesota, many of them in towns around Rochester, where I live. Once I started to meet these folks, and asked why they had come to the U.S., they said directly "Because Ethiopia is trying to kill our tribe."After several months of reporting, I concluded they were telling the absolute truth.

The dramatic moment came on December 13, 2003, when I received several telephone calls from my Anuak sources in and around Rochester. They told me that one of the periodic massacres of their people, which had been happening every two or three years for about 15 years, was happening that very day -- at that very moment. My Anuak sources in Minnesota told me that they were hearing the sounds of the massacre over their cell phones while in conversation with their friends and family still living in western Ethiopia. In many cases, Minnesota Anuak actually were listening to eyewitness accounts of the massacre of Anuak by uniformed Ethiopian military, right until the moment that their friend or loved one was killed while still on the telephone. As I said, it was a terrifically dramatic thing to hear this.

I did more reporting for a full week before I published. During that time I interviewed several dozen Anuak living in Minnesota, all of whom were totally traumatized and told the same exact story - being on cell phone conversations, hearing the massacre going on in the background, fearing their loved ones had been killed. I myself called survivors in the region and asked them to give me eyewitness accounts, and I asked them too, to go out in the streets and to a local mass grave to count the number of bodies. I kept getting a number around 425 or so killed. I called the Ethiopia government and got a denial. After a week of reporting, I finally published this article - I followed up with many articles over the following months including, in April 2004, using money from the Knight Foundation, I flew to Ethiopia and Sudan, and interviewed dozens of Anuak eyewitness. This led to my asserting that an actual genocide was taking place.

My story caused many global NGO's to take notice - first Genocide Watch and the World Organization Against Torture, both of which corroborated my account with their own research times, and finally, 1 1/2 years after the December 13 massacre, Human Rights Watch released a 75-page report asserting that the Ethiopian government had "targeted" the Anuak tribe for cleansing in "crimes against humanity." Several international justice groups have started proceedings to bring the Ethiopian Prime Minister, Meles Zenawai, to the International Criminal Court under charges of genocide. And there have been many other global repercussions, again, all of which began simply, with a reporter living in southern Minnesota listening carefully to what Anuak refugees told him, and reporting what he heard.

I eventually got pieces on the Anuak genocide into The New Republic, Minnesota Public Radio, and other places. But the original stories and by far the fullest coverage overall, were all published and still is published on The McGill Report. A selection is on The McGill Report home page under "The Anuak Genocide."

One story I'm especially proud of, is my one-on-one interview with the Ethiopian minister who, my reporting concluded, probably is the one who ordered the December 13 massacre. It's called "An Interview With Ethiopia's Minister of Genocide." Jay Rosen, at NYU, wrote a piece about my uncovering the Anuak genocide story as a "glocal" journalist. (Reprinted from Jay's PressThink blog.)

There is no research I know of that says that people want to read about genocide. What research I see - especially as it relates to young people college and much younger - suggests they want to know about the lives of their neighbors. They ask such questions as, Why did they leave their country? How did they get here? What is it like for them to start over? In a way this explains their current world to them.

In the United States today, there are more than 10 million young people between the ages of 5 and 17 who were born in another country. That is 1 out of every 5 children K through 12 was not born in the United States. They are the friends and neighbors of our children. North American children are living in the most global society. It is natural for them to be interested in other places.

This all has personal relevance. The neighborhood where I grew up in Fort Wayne, Indiana, was 50-50 Black and White when I was that age. Today it is called Little Burma. Fort Wayne has the most Burmese refugees in the United States. Life in Burma and the Burmese life in Fort Wayne is a local story for The News-Sentinel. It’s a nice first step to becoming glocal. My guess is that many towns have stories like these. That was Jack Hamilton’s premise. That is at the core of Doug McGill’s movement.

Readers want foreign news - but some of it need not come from foreign bureaus; it is right here in our back yard.


Multimedia coverage of international stories

If we are re-inventing foreign coverage, we have to think beyond print. The Fort Wayne-Burma story is told in both print and interactive media and told with media partners. The News-Sentinel used college students to help produce the story.

At Yahoo!, reporter Kevin Sites has added the multi-media dimension to his foreign coverage.


By Michael P. Smith (m-smith3@northwestern.edu)
Michael P. Smith is executive director of the Media Management Center.

This is a very helpful post. I devote a chapter in my book, Making Important News Interesting, to strategies for covering world news in meaningful ways. Doug McGill is certainly a pioneer of local reporting for global impact. The Atlanta Journal-Constitution also had a freestanding section, Atlanta & The World, that explored global themes through local reporting for a few years. Unfortunately, it was recently discontinued.

Posted by  Perry Parks at February 26, 2007 3:20 PM

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