The St. Louis
Post-Dispatch's news meetings take place in a room with walls covered by a
world map and an assortment of old news photos and cartoons. That hasn't
changed for a long time. But what goes on at those meetings has.
On this day, April 1, Metro Editor Kathleen Best reports first and says
she has nothing to offer for page one. But Tim Poor, the national editor
(whose bailiwick includes foreign) has plenty, including a dispatch on
Israel's continued offensive in the West Bank and a Washington bureau
story explaining President Bush's Middle East policies. Both stories run
out front the next day.
While the Post-Dispatch has, in its 124-year history, often had a
broader outlook than many regional papers, in recent years it seemed that
almost any decent local story could keep virtually any foreign news off of
page one.
September 11 changed that--to some extent.
"All things being equal, we prefer local news," says Steve Parker, the
news editor in charge of page one. "But we don't skew things now. Before
September 11, we skewed heavily to local." Poor agrees. "What gets me is
when a local story goes on page one just because it's local. We used to do
that a lot; less now."
What's true of the Post-Dispatch seems true of papers across the
country.
Many are putting more energy and resources into their foreign reports
than at any time since the Cold War. Reporters are going abroad for
short-term assignments when they didn't before; page-one editors are not
grimacing when wire editors promote foreign stories for the front; and
more space is being found for stories with international datelines.
When Peter Arnett first surveyed foreign coverage for the Project on
the State of the American Newspaper more than three-and-a-half years ago,
he stated: "I'll put it simply: International news coverage in most of
America's mainstream papers has almost reached the vanishing point. Today,
a foreign story that doesn't involve bombs, natural disasters or financial
calamity has little chance of entering the American consciousness." (See
"Goodbye, World," November 1998.)
In such times--the late 1990s, for example--most foreign stories
plucked off the wire at most newspapers looked forward to an obscure life
in an obscure column called "world report" or "world in brief."
The distressing irony, many editors discovered too late, is that what
was going on in the Muslim world became the biggest local story most of us
had ever seen, regardless of where we lived.
Now, says Keith Graham, world editor of the Atlanta
Journal-Constitution--echoing the sentiments of many of his peers--top
editors "have become more aware that foreign news is important, and that
people need to be exposed to it."
But a word of caution: The changed attitude should not be overstated.
Local news is still comfortably atop the food chain. Foreign is just not
as far down.
Further, when editors send reporters abroad, it is often for stories
that have some hometown connection; seldom is it just because a situation
is inherently interesting.
And Arnett's observation about bombs, disaster and financial calamity
is still largely valid. The two stories dominating the foreign report,
Afghanistan and the Middle East, are certainly filled with bombs and
disaster. Those two stories are eating most of the space allotted for
foreign news, even if that space has increased somewhat since the attacks
on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.
Those caveats aside, there does seem to be a new acceptance of the
notion that what happens abroad affects local readers as residents of the
world's most important country. It deserves good play. And more space
should be devoted to it.
How long will this last? The general consensus: The appetite for
foreign news will remain hearty for some time; it will slowly dissipate,
but it is not likely to become anemic again in the foreseeable future.
Edward Seaton, editor in chief of Kansas' Manhattan Mercury, was an
aggressive champion of foreign coverage when he headed the American
Society of Newspaper Editors in 1998-99. "I think you'll find if you take
the February papers this year as opposed to last year, you'll find more
foreign news," he says. "It won't be as high next year, but not as low as
a year ago."
To get a sense of how things have changed, I compared the editions of
four newspapers during a week in March 2001 to a week in March of this
year. All four--the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Kansas City Star, Atlanta
Journal-Constitution and Los Angeles Times--had more foreign news this
year.
Mark Zieman, editor of the Kansas City Star, says, "I don't know when
you go back" to reporting foreign news like the pre-9/11 days. "I sort of
think you never will."
Martin Baron, editor of the Boston Globe, isn't so sure. "There's been
a sincere effort to explain the roots and cause" of the conflict in the
Middle East and of the Muslim hostility toward the West, says Baron, who
left the editorship of the Miami Herald and took over the Globe six weeks
before the World Trade Center was attacked (see "Taking Command," April).
"But it's hard to judge if the industry is improving. These are
high-profile events, and we'll always cover those. We saw during the gulf
war a tremendous amount of attention and resources, and when the war was
over, the attention faded. I'm certainly concerned that when these events
fade--if they ever do--we won't be paying as much attention. We tend to be
driven by crisis."
A recent survey of 218 editors, conducted for the Pew International
Journalism Program by Dwight L. Morris & Associates in Virginia,
reinforces such predictions. Some 95 percent of editors said reader
interest in foreign news increased after September 11 (one wonders in what
cave those other 5 percent dwell), and 78 percent said their newshole for
foreign news had increased. But 64 percent expected their readers to
gradually lose interest and 58 percent expected their foreign newshole to
shrink back to previous levels. The survey also found that only 43 percent
of editors thought they were doing an "excellent" or "good" job of
satisfying reader interest in international news.
And some things haven't changed even now. It was true before, and it is
still true, that very few papers have foreign bureaus, and most that do
don't have very many. Foreign outposts are expensive; they can cost as
much as $200,000 or more a year to maintain, not counting salaries and
housing allowances. In fact, I could find no newspaper that has opened a
foreign bureau since September 11.
At least one, though, the Star-Ledger in Newark, formed a two-person
foreign staff that is based in New Jersey. Its mission: to travel the
world to put together projects that won't be found anywhere else.
I reviewed three midsize regional papers--the Post-Dispatch, Star and
Journal-Constitution--from the week of March 11-17, 2001, six months
before 9/11. Like many papers of their size, they provided a basic diet of
foreign news every day--about four to six columns covering the absolute
essentials. But that report, for the most part, was a compendium of 8- to
12-inch stories that laid out the facts but offered little background,
little flavor, little analysis. And they seldom strayed beyond yesterday's
developments.
And to some extent, that hasn't changed. There's still not much foreign
copy beyond the big stories, and there is little to illuminate the values
and cultures of different countries – the very kind of stories that might
explain the anger seething in the Muslim world.
Stephen Hess, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution who has long
studied foreign coverage, observed just before the Middle East exploded:
"Are there more stories about housing in Japan, transportation in Sweden
or the Irish elections? The answer is no. Because the space for
international news has been allotted to this one story [the war in
Afghanistan] today--as it should be. It's a terribly important story....
The only question is: Will there be an increase in serious international
news once the troops come home? Some people have made judgments that the
answer is yes. They smoke something I don't smoke."
Still, as part of the general acceptance that foreign news deserves
more respect than it got before September 11, papers are writing more
"what does it mean" paragraphs into the stories they do run. Says Darryl
Levings, the Kansas City Star national editor whose domain includes
foreign news: "We've gotten a little more space [for foreign news] and
we're clearly more sensitive. If Colombian guerrillas raid Bogotá, we'll
be more sensitive to that. We're more educated now to Kashmir and what it
means to our security."
Seaton, of the Manhattan Mercury, says that one of the duties of
newspapers is to keep readers from being surprised by major developments.
By that measure, almost every American paper failed its readers before
September 11. The big papers, to be sure, wrote at some length about
terrorism and its possible implications for the United States. Jack Kelley
of USA Today was a Pulitzer finalist in beat reporting this year for his
work on terrorism. But such stories rarely made it into the nation's
regional papers.
"I think all of us are asking why didn't we see this coming in greater
dimension," says Ron Martin, until recently editor of the
Journal-Constitution. "As an industry, we haven't reported effectively
enough the forces at work."
Even the Los Angeles Times, says Managing Editor Dean Baquet, didn't
write enough about the U.S. government's "failure to grapple with
terrorism. We wrote a lot about terrorism, but we didn't look enough at
the government's ability to deal with terrorism."
Ivisited the Post-Dispatch on the recommendation of Donald Shanor, a
one-time foreign correspondent and a former journalism professor at
Columbia University, who is writing a book about foreign coverage called
"News from Abroad." Shanor says the Post-Dispatch is a paper that, without
its own foreign bureaus, nevertheless presents a well-thought-out report
for its 290,000 daily and 472,000 Sunday readers.
Several walls on the first floor of the Post-Dispatch building are
filled with quotations from Joseph Pulitzer. Presiding over the Pulitzer
Inc.-owned paper now is Ellen Soeteber, 51, who began her career as the
second female "copyboy" at the Chicago Daily News. After years at the
Chicago Tribune and the Tribune Co.'s Sun-Sentinel in South Florida, where
she was managing editor, she returned to St. Louis in January 2001 to run
her hometown paper.
When I reviewed the pre-September 11 Post-Dispatch, it had a relatively
mundane six or seven foreign stories a day, stuff like a half-column from
the AP on the Japanese prime minister promising to resign or a half-column
on the latest back-and-forth between Ariel Sharon and Yasser Arafat. The
essentials were there, but not much else.
One exception was consistent attention to the conflict in the Balkans,
a reflection, Soeteber explains, of St. Louis' large Bosnian population.
Soeteber is seen in the newsroom as a proponent of broader coverage,
but she seems of two minds about foreign stories. "You give me a choice
between a local story and a foreign story, and I'll take a local story,"
she says. "News is most important when it has an impact on people's lives.
Local is most important, but more foreign stories have the possibility to
have impact." That, she says, makes them local stories.
So the Post-Dispatch makes its mark in foreign news by looking for
opportunities to link international stories to local interests. When John
Danforth, the former U.S. senator from Missouri, was dispatched by
President Bush to the Sudan last January to try to negotiate an end to a
vicious 19-year civil war, the Post-Dispatch sent Washington Bureau Chief
Jon Sawyer with him. Sawyer was also in Iraq in May, traveling with a
group of peace activists, some from Missouri. Sawyer, who has reported
from abroad for years, says most of his assignments have had a Missouri
connection, but not all.
When Dr. Sharon Frey, an infectious disease specialist at Saint Louis
University who volunteers her medical talents every Christmas in some
trouble-plagued venue, chose Afghanistan last year, Post-Dispatch reporter
Phillip O'Connor went with her. His marching orders beyond covering Frey:
Forget the battles, write about the place and the people. O'Connor filed
14 stories in 15 days from Afghanistan, half on Frey. O'Connor then went
to Pakistan for more people stories.
He showed me a couple that he was particularly proud of, including a
sensitive profile of a Taliban fighter who had returned safely to his
village, Dasht-e-Qal'eh, where he was showing off his newly developed
skill: writing his name. The layout--featuring a picture of Sardor, the
one-named fighter, standing in front of a cracked wall and holding a
rifle, along with a map and the start of O'Connor's story--consumed almost
half of page one on the day after Christmas.
With stories like that, says Managing Editor Arnie Robbins, "we can
bring perspective to readers that they wouldn't get [otherwise]."
At the morning news meeting the day I was in St. Louis, Soeteber, tall
and soft-spoken, suggested that the paper needed a story explaining
President Bush's policy in the Middle East. This was during the period
when analysts were calling attention daily to apparent inconsistencies in
his policy--saying one day that Israel had a right to defend itself and
the next that suicide bombings did not necessarily meet his definition of
terrorism.
At the afternoon news meeting, National Editor Poor said that
Washington correspondent Philip Dine would file a story about the
balancing act the administration was trying to pull off between its
support for Israel and its other interests in the Middle East. The piece
ran at the top of page one the next day, April 2, along with an Associated
Press story about Israeli forces moving into Bethlehem.
Does Soeteber think her paper will ever return to the foreign news
desert of the late '90s? "If we go back to pre-9/11, if we had world
peace, there would be less interest in foreign news. But I don't think
that will happen."
Ron Norton, an assistant wire editor on the national desk, says he has
his own mission for foreign stories: trying to get Zimbabwe in the paper.
"I think there is a potential for a bloodbath, and I like to periodically
let the readers know what's going on, even if it's just three graphs," he
says.
Such dedicated subversion helps the foreign report of any paper.
But on the day I was in St. Louis, Zimbabwe wasn't exciting people. The
biggest chunk of page one was turned over to pictures from opening day in
St. Louis, where the Cardinals defeated the Colorado Rockies, 10-2.
"Today," said Night News Editor Laszlo Domjan, "everything is
subservient to the Cardinals."
Across Missouri, in Kansas City, the Star is located in an elegant,
century-old red brick building. Mark Zieman, the 41-year-old editor, sits
without a tie in his newsroom office. Zieman says he was struck by a
recent call he had from his publisher, who wanted to know more about a
rumor that an Egyptian airliner had been hijacked. "He asked me about it,"
says Zieman, a little incredulously. "How likely before September 11 would
the publisher call about that?"
Managing Editor/News Steve Shirk explains the interest this way: "We
are in the middle of the country, and people felt isolated and secure. No
more. There was even a drop of anthrax here."
The Knight Ridder-owned Star, with a circulation of 266,000 daily and
380,000 Sunday, is neatly organized. Page two has a title, Nation Watch,
and everything after that is national until the next title, which in early
April was War on Terror. After that came the page-one jumps, on pages
called From The Cover. And finally, there is a page labeled World Watch
that is at least half ad-free, and all the stories from there to the end
of the A section are foreign.
This, Zieman says, gives the foreign report prominence and makes it
easy to find. And there was more foreign news in the Star six months after
September 11 than six months before. For the week of March 11-17, 2001, I
counted 36 columns of foreign news. For the week of March 3-9, 2002, I
counted 43, an increase of 20 percent.
As in papers elsewhere, much of the foreign news dealt with Afghanistan
or the Middle East, leaving little space for the rest of the planet.
But I was struck by some of the staff-produced copy. On Monday, March
4, for instance, Rick Montgomery had a carefully researched page-one piece
on the decades-long antagonism between Sharon and Arafat. "Nobody alive
better embodies the history of the Middle East than the two leaders locked
today in a bloody battle of wills: the no-nonsense general and the
enigmatic revolutionary." So started the story that ran more than two
columns.
Montgomery is one of two national reporters based in Kansas City who
try to write stories that provide context to developing events. Until
September 11, the vast majority of his stories were national, often with a
Missouri or Kansas angle. Since September 11, it's all been foreign.
One story, on the long-running rebellion in the Philippines, cowritten
with Grace Hobson, was of particular interest to the Kansas City region. A
Kansas couple, missionaries Martin and Gracia Burnham, were taken hostage
in May 2001 by the Abu Sayyaf rebels. Martin Burnham was killed in a
shoot-out on June 7.
"There's certainly nothing like a local angle to focus people's
attention," says Wire Editor Clayton Keller, in a tone that suggests he
wishes it wasn't always so. "We never wrote about the Philippines until a
Kansas couple got kidnapped."
One of the drawbacks in using reporters this way, as Montgomery readily
acknowledges, is that it takes a few days to "figure out the landscape."
For reporters who parachute into foreign countries, the problems are only
compounded. Graham, world editor of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, says
only half jokingly that "I always figure your IQ drops 100 points by the
time you hit the ground and start coping with logistical problems."
Two Star reporters also covered the war in Afghanistan, but they were
augmenting the foreign staff of parent Knight Ridder, which footed the
bill. One of the two, Malcolm Garcia, had traveled previously to Sierra
Leone with photographer Joe Ledford, following local medical teams who had
gone to treat victims of the civil war there. "It was of interest to local
readers," Zieman says.
National Editor Levings also contributes a distinct touch to the Star's
foreign coverage by designing "primers," elaborate full-page color
graphics that break down the history of complex world events. One in
March, called the "The Mideast: Two Paths or Just One," included a huge,
detailed color map delineating where each violent incident had occurred
that month, along with other information allowing a newly interested
reader to catch up with the story.
The Star has a rule that at least three page-one stories every day must
have staff bylines. The rule, of course, means that much of the first
section is occupied by local jumps. Even with that limitation, foreign
stories are finding their way to the front more readily than in the past.
But in Kansas City, as elsewhere, where the orthodoxy for so long had
been local, local, local, it's impossible to say whether this interest
will endure. The overall foreign report "is not that different between
pre-September 11 and now, except in the hot spots like the Middle East and
Afghanistan," says Keller. "And I believe it will be the same in two
years."
Zieman says he's not so sure, and he cites studies by Minnesota Opinion
Research Inc. that show a broad interest in foreign news.
Even before September 11, before a shaken country suddenly began
studying atlases like they were box scores, there was evidence in Kansas
City and elsewhere that foreign news engaged more people than editors
generally acknowledged. After all, 10 percent of the nation's 280 million
people were born elsewhere, and who knows how many have traveled abroad.
"What is the research that says you don't do foreign news?" asks Tom
Rosenstiel, director of the Washington, D.C.-based Project for Excellence
in Journalism. "My strong suspicion is that the focus is to cut costs;
foreign bureaus are expensive. It's a matter of cost, not demand."
Zieman in Kansas City and John Carroll, editor of the Los Angeles
Times, asked their research directors to share the results of readership
surveys with me. The responses in those disparate cities seem to back up
Rosenstiel's assertion. Foreign news in both locales is of more interest
to more readers than most other subjects in the newspaper. And the
interest of those who want it is as intense as those who want sports,
often cited as a subject with relatively low readership but extremely high
loyalty.
In Kansas City, for instance, a mid-American city that prides itself on
mid-American values, the survey asked readers which of 47 topics
interested them most. Before September 11, international news came in
ninth, eight places ahead of sports. In the post-September 11 period, it
moved up to third, behind only local and national.
Mark Whitaker, research and database manager for the Star, speculates
that foreign news will probably fade to fifth or sixth place in subsequent
surveys, but he believes it will remain higher than ninth for quite some
time. And he believes from his research that Kansas City is typical. The
Los Angeles Times, published in a sprawling, ethnic and distinctly
non-middle-American market, has seen similar survey results. Instead of
the traditional annual or semi-annual surveys, the Times, like a
presidential candidate, does daily tracking, interviewing 50 people a day,
250 a week. At the Times, says Ed Batson, director of marketing research,
readers are categorized not so much by demographics as by mind-set,
attitude and interest. It turns out that more than 50 percent of frequent
Times readers are categorized as either "cosmopolitan enthusiast" or
"dedicated hard news and business," and for those people national news,
politics and government, and foreign news are always at the top of the
interest list, says Batson. "It's what makes their heart go
pitter-patter."
After September 11, says Batson, "Everything changed in terms of topic
interest." Foreign news catapulted from around eighth or ninth to No. 2
among all readers. Sports was in 20th place before September 11 and
remained there.
Overall, Batson concludes, "attention to national and international
news is not only good journalism. It is in our enlightened self-interest."
Everything was running a little late the day I visited the Los Angeles
Times. It was Pulitzer day, and the Times had won two of the coveted
prizes, one for editorial writing and one for feature writing. First there
was a celebration in the newsroom, followed by a cocktail party. Then
Times correspondent Richard Boudreaux's satellite phone ran out of power.
He had filed 11 inches of a 25-inch story from Nablus on the West Bank
when the phone went silent. When he finally called back, he said he had
borrowed a battery, which was also almost out of power, but he would soon
file the rest of his piece.
The foreign desk hardly missed a beat. A lot can happen when you have
23 foreign bureaus and 30 correspondent positions and spend about $10
million a year to cover international news.
I visited Los Angeles because I wanted to talk to the editors at one of
the few papers--the New York Times, Washington Post and Wall Street
Journal are the others--that, along with the Associated Press, set the
agenda for foreign news coverage. The Los Angeles Times foreign report
isn't just seen by the paper's 986,000 daily and 1.4 million Sunday
readers. The Los Angeles Times-Washington Post News Service's subscribers
include 379 papers in the U.S. and another 227 abroad. So the reach of the
Times' foreign coverage is enormous. (It would be even greater if stories
moved on the wire earlier, making it easier for East Coast and Midwest
papers to publish them.) Even before September 11, Editor John Carroll had
beefed up space for foreign as well as national and metro stories by
reducing the regional editions, he says, from "a ton-and-a-half of space
to a ton."
The paper now has a section called The World that starts with a clear
page three and continues until the foreign report is exhausted. The
section can grow or shrink as news warrants. In the week I reviewed--March
3-9, 2002--the paper had 12 to 15 columns daily for foreign news, up from
about 10 or 12 a year earlier.
Some of those 2001 columns contained brilliant work, such as a two-part
series by Richard C. Paddock describing how Christians of both sexes in
Ambon, Indonesia, were forced to become Muslim and then undergo brutal
genital surgery with kitchen knives and razor blades.
Carroll, 60, was named editor in April 2000 after the Tribune Co.
purchased a Times that had been demoralized under the leadership of parent
Times Mirror Chairman and CEO Mark H. Willes. (See "Down and Out in L.A.,"
January/February 2000, and "Tribune's Big Deal," May 2000.) Carroll, who
always appears misleadingly laid-back, says one reason he increased the
space for foreign news was because he thought it important to demonstrate
early on that "we would still be a first-class operation in covering the
world. It was a question I asked when I was interviewing."
His goal now: "To cover everything of consequence that happens and give
it a lot of space. We want to do it with depth and sophistication. Not
just headlines."
To put an exclamation point on that interest, Carroll and Publisher
John Puerner flew to Japan a few months after they took over to meet with
the Times' Asia correspondents. The trip lasted less than 36 hours, but it
sent a powerful message. Several months later, Carroll and Puerner flew to
Rome to meet the paper's European reporters.
Simon K.C. Li, 55, London-born and Oxford-educated, is the urbane
foreign editor of the Times, a job he's held since 1995. Before that, he
was an assistant editor and deputy editor on the foreign desk for nine
years. (Full disclosure: Li and I worked together at the Philadelphia
Inquirer. Carroll and I also overlapped there.) Normally, Li says, the
Times keeps two reporters in Jerusalem. When I visited the paper in early
April, with the Mideast at full boil, it had four in Jerusalem, plus two
photographers. Among them was Carolyn Cole, who later managed to get into
Bethlehem's Church of the Nativity during the five-week siege there in
April and May. At the peak of the fighting in Afghanistan, the Times had
eight reporters and two photographers in Afghanistan and Pakistan.
Given the size of the reporting staff, Li does not work with a
particularly large editing corps: one deputy and three assistants. One
assistant concentrates on daily news, a job that is so intense he is
scheduled for 10 hours a day, four days a week. The others handle features
and projects. Li sets standards and priorities, and hires for the foreign
staff, a job, say others, that he performs with almost reverential care.
That the reporter needs talent and experience is a given. After that, "You
need someone who can play well with others," Li says. "You can't referee
quarrels from thousands of miles away, and you can't let a colleague get
into trouble."
Li says he talks philosophy with reporters before they leave. "I want
stories to be readable. That's the answer to people who aren't interested
in foreign news. And that means interesting topics. I'm not that big on
incremental."
Most important, he says, are stories that "illustrate different
cultures. There are more ways of living, thinking than the American way.
And there are different values. They exist and need to be taken into
account."
An example of the type of story the Times encourages: To illustrate the
Japanese distaste for confrontation, the paper described a developing
trend of hiring people to do the confronting--like delivering the message
to your significant other that you want out. On the day I was there, in
the midst of the Mideast chaos, the Times still found room for a
column-and-a-half story on an environmental group in Mexico City that
makes purses and satchels by recycling inner tubes and garbage.
Those are exactly the stories that most other papers seldom, if ever,
find room for.
It's not that the Times doesn't print its share of "violence spreads in
Macedonia" stories. But it prides itself on its enterprise. Managing
Editor Dean Baquet was lured by Carroll from the New York Times, where he
was national editor. He says the Los Angeles Times, by not being in the
New York-Washington axis, "has to call more attention to itself, and the
way to do that is enterprise and stuff others aren't doing. We don't have
to do every development. We have the freedom to play a little bit. It's
liberating not to be regarded as the newspaper of record."
By relying on enterprise, the Times' distinct report tends to have
fewer stories than the other Times or the Post, but they are longer and
touch more bases.
The paper is also getting ready to change its emphasis a bit. A second
reporter was assigned to Mexico City on June 1, and two more are planned.
"Mexico is a local story for us," says Carroll. Generally, he says, "we
should have more of a West Coast perspective. We intend to put more into
Latin America and Asia and perhaps a little less into Europe." But that
doesn't mean the paper is pulling out of Europe, he says.
Of course, many Asian and Latin American stories are practically local
stories in Los Angeles, given its extraordinary ethnic mix. All of which,
says Carroll, makes stories from those parts of the world help sell the
Times.
When Peter Arnett wrote about the Cox-owned Atlanta
Journal-Constitution in his 1998 piece, he interviewed Keith Graham, who
at the time had been world editor for about a year. Graham, Arnett wrote,
was making a "determined bid to strengthen international coverage...[but]
he knew the odds."
Today, Graham is still world editor, and he says the odds are better
for foreign news generally. For big stories, like the Middle East, "it's
easy to get stuff in."
When I reviewed the Journal-Constitution for the week of March 11-17,
2001, I found that while it tended to run about the same five or six
columns of foreign copy as the other regional papers, it also tended to
run stories with more length and detail. It used a lot of copy from the
six-member Cox Newspapers foreign staff, which is run out of Washington.
Most noteworthy, though, was the effort it made to tie Atlanta to the
world. On Monday it ran Global Atlanta, stories in the metro section that
ranged from families getting ready for local National Guard members to go
to Bosnia to a crime patrol in a local Korean neighborhood.
On Thursday there was International Atlanta, with stories about
Atlantans abroad or about to go. One story focused on representatives of
Atlanta's Carter Center who were going to Guyana to monitor an election.
A year later, the paper was devoting eight to 11 columns a day to
foreign, counting what was usually a clear page for the war on terrorism.
There was one day when two local jumps consumed much of the A section and
foreign was reduced to about five columns, but on another day there was
room for a prescient staff piece from Venezuela, explaining why President
Hugo Chavez was in trouble with business, labor and the Catholic Church.
Weeks later he was briefly ousted in an attempted coup.
"We try to brief a lot of things so we have room to do some stories at
length," Graham says. "We're not consistent, but we do think we need
something of weight."
As at other papers, Afghanistan and the Middle East these days dominate
the space for foreign news.
Except on Wednesday. After September 11, the Journal-Constitution
combined Global Atlanta and International Atlanta, added some other
material and created a weekly stand-alone, eight-page section called
Atlanta & the World. It contains about 30 columns of news.
"There were increasing numbers of foreigners moving to Atlanta and a
heightened interest of Atlanta business and its outreach to the world,"
says John Walter, until recently the paper's executive editor. "It was a
drip, drip, drip story, not a breaking story, and we wanted to report it
and be smart about it."
The section, which debuted on February 20, is edited by Raman
Narayanan, recruited from CNN International. He has five full-time
reporters. In the issues I read, it was clear Narayanan was publishing
stories that used Atlanta as a peg for explaining broader issues
elsewhere.
So the fact that a graduate student at the University of Georgia helped
establish an opposition political party in Zimbabwe resulted in a hefty
piece, with graphics, on the Zimbabwe election last March. A story on the
post-September 11 treatment of immigrants hardly even alluded to Atlanta.
On the other hand, tensions between India and Pakistan were used as a
peg to report on a group in Atlanta that brings together Indians,
Pakistanis and others from South Asia. "I don't use the word
'globalization,' " says Narayanan. "We just tell stories about what is
happening."
The Journal-Constitution also assigned six reporters to cover what
former Editor Ron Martin called the "new normal," how things have changed
since September 11. Reporters concentrate on the military, civil
liberties, health (with a heavy focus on the Atlanta-based Centers for
Disease Control), homeland security, bioterrorism and cyberterrorism.
The reporters work for Graham--the world editor.
Look at USA Today," advises the Brookings Institution's Stephen Hess.
"It's a bright spot. It was once a paper with a foreign editor and no
foreign correspondents. It's not true now."
So I visited the sassy, ultramodern new headquarters in McLean,
Virginia, that USA Today shares with parent Gannett to find out why the
nation's largest-selling paper--2.1 million a day and 2.6 million for the
weekend edition--had upgraded its coverage of foreign news.
David Colton has been with USA Today almost since its first day, 20
years ago in September, when most journalists were saying the colorful,
graphic-laden upstart would never make it. He is now the page-one editor,
and for a paper with very little home delivery, that is a job in which you
had better score every day. Colton, for instance, knows the
biggest-selling single-day issue ever was the day after 9/11, but that
February 19, 2001, was no slouch either. That was the paper that reported
the racing-accident death of legendary NASCAR driver Dale Earnhardt. "Dale
Earnhardt added hundreds of thousands to the sale," Colton says.
So it is instructive to hear an editor so attuned to what sells and
what doesn't proudly note that in the 1990s, when so many papers were
cutting back on foreign news and foreign reporters, USA Today opened its
first overseas bureaus.
"We did it," he says, "because foreign news isn't foreign anymore. It's
domestic news. It's impossible to decouple what happens overseas with
domestic.... We finally discovered that content sells. You can't live on
just scores and stock prices." Before September 11, the paper was
regularly providing at least a half-page of foreign news, including art.
Now it has more than a page and sometimes as much as two.
Foreign news and foreign bureaus also added heft and legitimacy to USA
Today's international edition. "In trying to improve the quality and
foreign recognition of USA Today, a better world report was necessary,"
says Bill Sternberg, senior Washington and world editor.
The paper's foreign lineup hardly resembles the L.A. Times'. It has
just four bureaus: Hong Kong (the first, opened in 1995), London, Berlin
and Mexico City. A fifth correspondent, based in Virginia, travels almost
full time. Jerusalem is on the drawing board, and Beijing is set to open
at the end of July. The paper also has two Washington-based diplomatic
correspondents.
USA Today, of course, does not claim to be a paper of record for
foreign news. Instead, it has two goals for its international report:
cover the most important news of the day, if just in brief, and offer
stories not found elsewhere that allow American readers to see the
connection between international developments and their own lives. The
perfect USA Today story might be about health care for seniors in Europe
or child care in Asia, "issues that Americans are interested in for
themselves," says World Editor Elisa Tinsley.
"At its heart," says Colton, "foreign reporting should show how events
overseas interconnect with the lives and well-being of our readers." Like
most papers, its foreign report these days is mainly about the Middle East
and Afghanistan. At the end of April, when I visited USA Today, not one
foreign reporter was in his or her assigned bureau. Hong Kong Bureau Chief
Paul Wiseman was in Jerusalem, reporters based in Berlin and Mexico were
in Afghanistan, and the London reporter was in the U.S. writing stories
she had covered abroad.
Clearly, the two megastories were overshadowing news from elsewhere. "I
keep saying we need to get things in the paper besides the Mideast," says
an animated Tinsley. But there's not much space for that, and there isn't
likely to be until the Mideast and Afghanistan calm down.
If USA Today's foreign report isn't all it might be, it is also true
that businesspeople and tourists who read it in hotels around the country
are getting more than they would from the local paper in most cities.
In the future, says Deputy Managing Editor Ed Foster-Simeon, who
oversees the world desk, "We'd like to keep a substantial foreign
report...our goal is to keep increasing foreign bureaus."
USA Today has, of course, parachuted reporters into foreign stories for
a long time. The lead parachuter is Jack Kelley, who is based in Virginia
but travels about 10 months a year and has worked in 90 countries (see
"Suicide Mission," June 1999). He happened to be at headquarters when I
was there because, after covering wars and other mayhem for years, he
broke his foot stepping off a curb in Salt Lake City. "If there's a war
going on and I'm not there, I feel deprived," Kelley says.
So maybe the morning news meeting shouldn't have been a surprise. It
took place in a 21st-century conference room: five televisions in the
front wall; six digital clocks showing the time in London, Hong Kong and
all four U.S. time zones; a huge glass wall looking out at the Money
section.
As far as I can tell, the USA Today morning meeting is the only one in
the country attended by a weather editor. And on the day I was there, the
longest report was given by Sternberg, the senior Washington/world editor.
I attended one other news meeting, and that was the most important of
all. It was in New York City on March 27 at 9:11 a.m., attended by five
editors gathered in a claustrophobic, charmless, no-frills room at 50
Rockefeller Plaza, the metaphorically correct opposite of USA Today's.
That was the morning meeting of the Associated Press international desk,
and there, more than anywhere else, decisions are made that influence how
most American newspapers present the world to their readers the next
morning.
Despite the supplemental wires, like the New York Times, Los Angeles
Times-Washington Post and Knight Ridder/Tribune, the venerable AP still
sets the table for wire editors almost everywhere. The AP digest--its
budget of top stories--moves to most American newsrooms around 1:30 p.m.
Eastern time. It is complete, it is familiar and, crucially, it is early
enough to guide wire editors as they report at their afternoon news
meeting about the day's potential page-one stories.
The AP, says Poor of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, "has a lot of
influence initially. It comes early in the day, and they are the only ones
telling you what's going on."
Even at the Los Angeles Times, with its vast overseas staff, Foreign
Editor Li says: "AP will give us the basics. They are a good checklist for
what we have to be considering."
The Associated Press has 95 foreign bureaus, with about 500 staff
journalists. The Wall of Honor on the fourth floor, covered with photos of
the 26 AP reporters and photographers who have died on assignment, attests
to their devotion to duty. The men and women who guide those bureaus from
the international desk are pros, serious about covering the world and
serious, as Senior Vice President Jonathan P. Wolman says, about "telling
a comprehensive story about trends and events across the world." By
intelligently using just the AP, any newspaper could put out a credible
foreign report, if one that sometimes seems a trifle lacking in
imagination.
The AP meeting on March 27 was run by Nick Tatro, short, stocky,
bearded and, like the AP itself, all-business. Tatro, 55, an AP veteran
who spent 20 years in various Middle East posts, is the deputy
international editor. His boss, International Editor Sally Jacobsen, was
out of the office that day.
In 39 minutes Tatro speed dialed bureaus in eight foreign countries and
Washington and talked for two or three minutes with each one, getting a
good sense of what was coming, and why. The conversations were crisp and
pointed. The editors in New York and the reporters in the field have
worked together, and in foreign news, for years. They all know what is
important. The question "Who cares?" is never asked.
Later Ellen Nimmons, who has been on this AP desk for 20 years, will
carefully write the budget lines. This is not a job taken lightly. The
budget line sets the tone for the story that editors across the country
expect. On March 27, the big news centered on the Arab League meeting in
Beirut, at which Saudi Crown Prince Abdullah formally submitted his peace
proposal: Arab recognition of Israel in return for Israel's pulling back
to pre-1967 borders and allowing all displaced Palestinians to return.
Nimmons, who reads the most important international spot news stories
before they are sent out, cautions that the meeting "is where we put
together the fundamentals. But we are responsive. If a good story comes
up, it's on the budget."
Not long after the daily digest had been disseminated, she sent out an
urgent message: "An explosion went off Wednesday evening in a hotel in the
Israeli coastal resort of Netanya, and paramedics said there were dozens
of casualties. The blast came at a time when Israelis were marking the
start of the weeklong Passover holiday."
Eventually, 29 would die.
And the urgency of foreign news was evident anew.