In the latest drawdown by American newspapers, the Boston Globe announced last week the closing of its last three foreign bureaus, leaving bloggers — particularly those with ink in their veins — feeling relatively unified that the move is a great loss.
“For years as a [Boston] Herald reporter, I would mock my colleagues at the Globe for being too slow, too comfortable, too full of themselves, or too focused on anything but the local story,” wrote David Callaway, editor-in-chief of MarketWatch. “Now the Globe is the local story. And it’s a sad day for Boston, as well as for journalism.”
Calling back home its remaining correspondents in Berlin, Bogota, and Jerusalem will preclude the further cutting of “a dozen or so positions” from the Globe‘s newsroom and save the paper more than $1 million annually, as the Globe moves more than ever toward local coverage and “journalism that has the most direct impact on our readers,” in the words of Editor Martin Baron. The move — which follows the Globe‘s dismantling of its national desk in 2005 and the formal closing of its Baghdad operation early in 2006 — “punctuates what seems to be an accelerating trend” of reduced foreign coverage, noted the Washington Post‘s Fred Hiatt, whose op-ed piece today is entitled “The Vanishing Foreign Correspondent.”
The current financial imperatives for newspapers’ staff cutbacks are well documented, and buying AP stories is a much more economic way to cover Iraq. Jack Welch, an interested buyer of the Globe, has often said he feels it unwise for a regional newspaper to cover worldly affairs. “I’m not sure local papers need to cover Iraq, need to cover global events,” Welch said recently on CNBC’s Squawk Box. “They can be real local papers. And franchise, purchase from people very willing to sell to you their wire services that will give you coverage.”
The money saved could well expand and improve local coverage, but journalistically speaking there is no tangible way to measure what is lost. “One of the principles behind the free press is the ‘marketplace of ideas,'” blogged Megan Taylor, a journalism student at the University of Florida. “If papers trade in their own voices for those of larger outlets, the number of voices in the arena, the number of perspectives heard by the public, is reduced.”
Many feel that foreign reporters is money well spent, and closing foreign bureaus will only exacerbate America’s ignorance about the world. “Since the collapse of the Soviet Union the world has become more, not less, complex. Therefore it needs more not fewer reporters covering it,” wrote Michael Goldfarb, an editor of the Weekly Standard, on Romenesko. “September 11th provoked the plaintive question: ‘why do they hate us?’ Cutting back foreign coverage isn’t going to help answer that question.”
But the question really should be this: will expanded or improved local coverage actually aid newspaper sales? It seems to be the saving newspaper theory du jour, but it simply skirts the problems posed by the Internet and 24-hour news networks by assuming that people will still pay full subscription prices for an ever-narrowing product.
The Boston Herald is one clear example where this theory has not worked. “No paper could be more Bostoncentric than the Herald‘s been the past decade,” wrote Michael Gee, a former Herald sportswriter, on his blog homegame. “It barely covers news from Newton, let alone Nigeria.” The Herald thought it understood the game — it could not compete with the Globe in foreign coverage, so it would outflank its broadsheet rival with local news. But as Gee wrote, “Logic took a beating. The Herald‘s circulation and revenues losses only escalated each time its news focus narrowed.”
The inherent danger in going local, Taylor noted, is that it could push more readers “even further into the Internet, searching for the news and voices we want.”
“We’ve already started to shift our loyalties to bloggers (vloggers, mobloggers, etc.) and alternate sources of news. That’s why you, Mr. Media CEO, are getting rid of seasoned reporters and recruiting newbies with online capabilities,” she wrote. “Way to shoot yourself in the foot.”
Dan Goldberg is a CJR intern.