THE
ON-LINE PUBLICATION OF THE FOREIGN CORRESPONDENTS' CLUB, HONG KONG
MEDIA
Where Have All the Corros Gone?
The number of mainstream foreign correspondents is declining
and the future of foreign correspondence is under threat. What
is happening in the field, what are the causes and what does
the future hold? Shanghai-based journalist, Fons
Tuinstra, comments.
“Reuters and Bloomberg are dinosaurs that will become obsolete
in two to three years,” predicted XFN managing director,
Graham Earnshaw, back in August 2003 at a meeting of the Shanghai
Foreign Correspondents’ Club.
Both the established newswires have lost their technological
competitive advantage of being able to deliver their news in
real time to their customers, said Earnshaw. Since the end of
the 1990s, the internet has made it possible for others, including
XFN (Xinhua Financial Services), to do the same.
The worldwide operations of the traditional newswires, deploying
a large number of journalists, puts a high burden on operations,
a burden that dates from the days when they mainly served the
media.
XFN, which acquired AFX-Asia, last year, focuses on the
lucrative financial markets only.
Earnshaw, who belongs to a group of experienced Reuters journalists
who retired in the second half of the 1990s, has 30 years of
journalistic experience in Asia and if it wasn’t for him
and two other Reuters’ veterans, we may have dismissed
this newcomer. But Earnshaw knows what he is talking about. Xinhua’s
lack of credibility outside China is greatly compensated by that
of the former Reuters journalists.
Other signals indicate times are not favourable for the traditional
foreign correspondent. Last summer I cancelled my last hardcopy
media subscription. Living in China, it was easier and cheaper
to get all information online, although media companies are supposed
to pay my rent.
In Shanghai we assumed the economic crisis was to blame for the
stagnation in the number of foreign correspondents in the rapidly
expanding city. A continuous stream of major events, including
9/11 and the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, gave us reason to
believe that we were living in extraordinary times and that when
the crises were over, things would return to normal.
Survival tactics were deployed. Colleagues joined emerging low-budget
local media operations or trade publications to survive the crisis.
Colleagues from Hong Kong sought refuge in Shanghai and Beijing.
Others had to widen their beats to cover larger parts of Asia.
The Foreign Correspondents’ Club, Hong Kong experienced
a drop in the number of correspondent members from over 400 in
the 1997 handover year to 170 in the spring of 2003. But the
number of journalist-members of the Foreign Correspondents’ Club
Japan (FCCJ) fell less dramatically from 361 in December 1998
to 340 in November 2003, reports Bob Neff, who is in charge of
membership at the FCCJ. “But the biggest plunge happened
already in the mid-1990s,” said Neff in an e-mail. “The
advertising slump in the U.S. over the past few years exacerbated
this.”
The number of foreign correspondents based in Bangkok also fell
in the 1990s and now totals about 100. The link between the downturn
in foreign correspondence and the economic crisis existed mainly
in our own perception.
Like a real battlefield, the picture is mixed at best. Africa
is almost a no-go area, while Brussels is one example where the
number of foreign correspondents is expanding very fast, says
Marc van Impe, chairman of the Belgium Press Institute in Brussels. “I
get at least three calls per week (from) new colleagues coming
to Brussels.”
The presence of NATO and the fast-expanding European Union is
behind this increase. “Each new member state in Europe
means about 30 new colleagues here in Brussels,” said van
Impe.
But a large portion of the news from Brussels is domestic European
news as the European Union expands its grip on the member states.
Dispatches about the developments in the EU replace reports from
the respective capitals in Europe.
There other winners too, such as the New York Times and the Associated
Press. “In the decade that I worked for the New York Times
the number of foreign correspondents has actually grown from
30 to 50,” said Howard French, the paper’s Shanghai
bureau chief.
The Times’s successful syndication service has allowed
other major U.S. print media to reduce the costs of foreign correspondence,
at the expense of their own voice. French grins when asked about
future of foreign correspondence and the growing dominance of
his paper. “What an awful thought that would be,” he
said.
A second survivor is the Associated Press. The news service set
up by search engine Google gives a good overview of what the
print media worldwide publish. In theory internet users have
an unprecedented access to online print stories from all over
the world, varying from radical Islamic voices to the official
viewpoints of the Chinese government. But increasingly even the
most exotic media rely on the international newswires, in many
cases AP. AP has become the McDonald’s of foreign newsgathering:
there is not much room for diversity in its menu.
In Europe, only the Financial Times might be said to
belong to the same league of survivors.
Otherwise the outlook
is grim.
The decline has started earlier than we assumed, and the economic
downturn offered a convenient excuse to speed up cost-cutting.
Highly profitable media would rather increase their return on
equity than the quality of their product.
Sam Jameson, the informal dean of American journalists in Tokyo,
arrived in Japan in 1960, initially for the Chicago Tribune, switching to the Los
Angeles Times in 1971 where he remained
until his retirement in 1996. Of the four correspondents in place
in 1996, none now remain.
The U.S. network, ABC, has also closed
its entire office. “Iraq is of course a bigger story than
the second largest economy in the world,” said Jameson
bitterly. “At the LA Times, the return on equity had to
go up from eight to 20 percent. That is now dictating the editorial
policy, nothing else. We are not talking about a change in reporting,
I call it the end of reporting about Japan.”
Other countries and continents are even lower on the media agenda.
It was not the economic crisis, followed by 9/11 and the wars
in Afghanistan and Iraq that was behind the reduction in foreign
correspondence. Rather it was the end of the Cold War and the
disappearance of this ideological conflict between capitalism
and communism that triggered the demise in interest in what is
happening abroad.
Both consumers of the mass media and editors at foreign desks
have less patience with foreign news when it is not coming from
a war zone. The “need to know” disappeared from the
media agenda together with the collapse of the Soviet Union. “Why
should we have an interest in other countries, now we are at
war and our soldiers coming back in body bags?” an American
media student asked me when I was teaching at a university in
Boston last Autumn.
He is not the only one who blames us for not having a story to
tell anymore. Our editors do the same. Il Manifesto is the Italian
communist newspaper and is owned by the journalists themselves.
It offers its foreign correspondents only marginal compensation
for their work and its long-serving correspondent, Pio d’Emilia
in Tokyo, is not a heavy financial burden. But he says the number
of stories he wrote for his paper decreased dramatically from
207 articles in 1997 – his record year – to 87 articles
in 2002.
At least d’Emilia is still in Tokyo but he is
the only Italian correspondent left. More than half a dozen other
Italian reporters left Japan during the 1990s. “Our paper
has only two pages for foreign news,” said d’Emilia. “It
prefers to have breaking news and not the really stories I can
write about the changes in the Japanese middle class.”
What is next, is a question that is not yet asked often enough.
The internet and especially webloggers are popping up as alternatives.
While they are not the cause of the demise of the classical foreign
correspondent, they might offer a viable alternative.
The Foreign
Correspondents' Club Hong Kong
2 Lower Albert Rd
Central
Hong Kong
APRIL-MAY 2004
