NEW YORK, 2014—Back in 2009, the future of international reporting looked bleak indeed. Several big U.S. newspapers had shut down their foreign bureaus altogether. The American TV networks had basically shrunk their international presence to London. Covering the Iraq war had nearly bankrupted foreign-news budgets, and by then, the American public had lost interest in the Iraq war. Or indeed in foreign news at all, a lot of the time. It was tough being the most expensive and least read story in the queue. Like a faded diva in a ratty mink stole (“Oh, this old thing? I bought it on assignment covering Brezhnev”), foreign correspondents slunk from the stage, costly and unwanted.

Yet even then you could have spied a few positive trends. First, the basic cost of international fact-gathering and distribution had fallen precipitously. Cameras and recorders were absurdly cheap and the means of transmission cheaper still. (Marx might have called it a revolution in the means of production.) Then, too, it was finally dawning on everyone that the United States was rapidly growing more international by almost every measure: the percentage of American businesses with interests overseas (and what was “American” business anymore anyway?), the percentage of the American population born in another country, the percentage of Starbucks customers buying the “World Music” CD at the cash register. You still couldn’t sell People magazine at the newsstand with Uganda’s Yoweri Museveni on the cover, maybe, but international news was locating an audience. Why were the BBC and The Economist moving into a market here if one didn’t exist?

A disproportionate number of media executives back in 2009 had been foreign correspondents in their glory days, of course, but even they had to admit that those days hadn’t necessarily been all that glorious. No one could...

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