Here’s an interesting Nieman Report on foreign correspondence. In the report’s introduction John Maxwell Hamilton suggests that it is public lack of interest in news from abroad that has created the limited paid foreign correspondence in the media today. Logistically challenging and costly, philanthropic models for news abroad, such as the one exemplified by the Christian Science Monitor, proffers one solution to the need to subsidize foreign correspondents.
The Pulitizer Center on Crisis Reporting has concluded that simply leveraging small grants to journalists isn’t really enough to allow individuals professional sustainability. In the article, Jon Sawyer concludes in emphasis of the need to include more local voices from abroad in order to offer up experiences no visitor can recreate. Solana Larsen elaborates on this point, concluding that “when journalists fumble in the dark to understand a foreign people and culture—and then report on events there—their audiences will fumble too.”
