The end of the foreign correspondent

Solana Larsen, co-managing editor of Global Voices Online, recently suggested that foreign correspondents will have disappeared by 2013.

This debate has been rumbling along in the background for a while. Back in October, John Simpson, World Affairs Editor at the BBC, said he regarded the foreign correspondent as an 'endangered species' on a programme for Radio 4.

Reporting overseas, and warfare in particular, has become more dangerous. In an article entitled 'Journalism and the war in Iraq', Howard Tumber noted that while reporting twenty-one years of conflict in Vietnam 63 journalists were killed.

By August 2004, 50 journalists had already lost their lives in Iraq. Reporters Without Borders claim that 156 journalists have been killed to date.

Safety-conscious and business-minded media organisations are now reluctant to send their journalists abroad, let alone pay to have them there permanently. The axing of foreign bureaux has long been recognised, as this video (among other things) demonstrates:



I found this video on Frontline's Blog, as part of an excellent digest of what has been said on the future of the foreign correspondent and various related issues, including blogging, local journalists, and the middle class nature of the journalism profession.

A few selected quotes of 2007

“I had reported many times on the kidnapping of foreigners in Gaza. Now, as I always feared it might, my turn had come.”

BBC Correspondent, Alan Johnston

“Of course the Territorial Army is overstretched and there’s no doubt about it. The TA is too small - mobilising it at the pace that we are is ultimately going to break it.”

Professor Richard Holmes

“I realise how totally unqualified I am to think about war. I don’t know what Myspace and Youtube are. In my generation they gave you a cheese sandwich and a tin hat. And you walked towards anybody who put a verb at the end of the sentence.”

Alan Coren, Radio 4: News Quiz, on the US Military banning
their soldiers from using certain Internet sites.

“It’s under more serious threat in fact I think than at any previous time because people are now saying: ‘You’re not needed. You’re an absurd anomaly. This idea of trying to sift out what has actually happened. What we want is people’s opinions about what has happened.’ And I think we are in danger. I never thought of myself as an endangered species before, but now I think probably, perhaps I am.”

BBC World Affairs Editor John Simpson on the role of the traditional correspondent

“Telling the story of what is happening in Iraq through a soldier’s eyes is a fraught project.”

Franklin Foer, Editor of the New Republic Magazine