The Future Foreign Correspondent

This book articulates the skills and perspectives that future foreign correspondents need to adopt in an increasingly globalized world. By revisiting entrenched traditions in the training and practice of international reporting, The Future Foreign Correspondent examines the changing role of a correspondent, outlining aspects that will evolve, the skills that will continue to be pivotal and those becoming even more important, such as the need for greater cultural understanding within the global media sphere. This book is a must read for journalists, media students and researchers interested in understanding what needs to be taken into consideration when reporting transcultural news spheres.

Despite the importance of foreign news, its history, transformation and indeed its future have not been much studied. The scholarly community often calls attention to journalism’s shortcomings covering the world, yet the topic has not been systematically examined across countries or over time. The need to redress this neglect and the desire to assess the impact of new media technologies on the future of journalism – including foreign correspondence – provide the motivation for this stimulating, exciting and thought-provoking book. While the old economic models supporting news have crumbled in the wake of new media technologies, these changes have the potential to bring new and improved ways to inform people of foreign news. In an increasingly globalized era, journalism is being transformed by the effortlessly quick sharing of information across national boundaries. As such, we need to reconsider foreign correspondence and explore where such reporting is headed. This book discusses the current state and future prospects for foreign correspondence across the full range of media platforms, and assesses developments in the reporting of overseas news for audiences, governments and foreign policy in both contemporary and historical settings around the globe. As Emmy Award and Pulitzer Prize-winning correspondent Serge Schmemann reminds us in this book, "quality journalism and unbiased reporting are as valid and necessary today as they ever were [...] one of the primary tasks of journalists and scholars as they follow the changes taking place must be to ensure that the ‘new international information order’ now imposed by the Internet remains true to the ideals and traditions that define our journalism." This book was originally published as a special issue of Journalism Studies.

"Kevin Williams has authored an account of "foreign" correspondence and international journalism that is the most comprehensively-sourced, inclusive, contextualized, timely and critical in its field. At last, we have an account that acknowledges that the largest employers of "foreign" correspondents for nearly two hundred years have been and continue to be the news agencies; that the occupation is rooted in a history of imperialism, post-colonialism and commercialization, whose vestiges today are all too apparent; that the impacts of so-called "new media" on the amount, range and quality of international news, while significant, are less dramatic and less positive than commonly supposed." - Oliver Boyd-Barrett, Bowling Green State University, Ohio What is the future of the foreign correspondent - is there one? Tracing the historical development of international reporting, Kevin Williams examines the organizational structures, occupational culture and information environment in which it is practiced to explore the argument that foreign correspondence is becoming extinct in the globalized world. Mapping the institutional, political, economic, cultural, and historical context within which news is gathered across borders, this book reveals how foreign correspondents are adapting to new global and commercial realities in how they gather, adapt and disseminate news. Lucid and engaging, the book expertly probes three global models of reporting - Anglo-American, European and the developing world - to lay bare the forces of technology, commercial constraint and globalization that are changing how journalism is practiced and understood. Essential reading for students of journalism, this is a timely and thought-provoking book for anyone who wishes to fully grasp the core issues of journalism and reporting in a global context.

Foreign News gives us a fascinating, behind-the-scenes look into the practices of the global tribe we call foreign correspondents. Exploring how they work, Ulf Hannerz also compares the ways correspondents and anthropologists report from one part of the world to another. Hannerz draws on extensive interviews with correspondents in cities as diverse as Jerusalem, Tokyo, and Johannesburg. He shows not only how different story lines evolve in different correspondent beats, but also how the correspondents' home country and personal interests influence the stories they write. Reporting can go well beyond coverage of a specific event, using the news instead to reveal deeper insights into a country or a people to link them to long-term trends or structures of global significance. Ultimately, Hannerz argues that both anthropologists and foreign correspondents can learn from each other in their efforts to educate a public about events and peoples far beyond our homelands. The result of nearly a decade's worth of work, Foreign News is a provocative study that will appeal to both general readers and those concerned with globalization.

Foreign Correspondent is about a girl reporter, Johnnie James, in search of international intrigue and romantic excitement. This short novel, written in evocative imagistic sections of short prose, follows Johnnie as she encounters philosophers, jaunty sports journalists, exotic lap birds, retired cage fighters, intrepid doppelganger gal-pals, Marxist sci-fi heart-throbs, fiery martial-arts vixens, and wizened jiu-jitsu masters, all the while fantasizing about ghosts, ninjas, birdmen, yakuza gangsters, wolf dogs, world war II spies, windmills, and volcanic lakes. Drawing heavily on language and tropes from Alfred Hitchcock’s film of the same title, the novel revels in fantasies of the stylized reportage and field research inspired by that film, but also takes up other corresponding forms—love letters, fan letters, telegrams, communiqués and dispatches—in general, many forms in which we pour our desires into language expressly for others: seeking to better understand and draw close what is distant, those who are familiar to us, as well as those who are foreign to us.

What are the influences on war correspondents as they report on events in war-torn countries? Mark Pedelty explores the lives, work and culture of the international press corps, examining the institutions, practices, myths, and rituals that shape the work of journalists everywhere. He looks at the context in which journalists construct their reports. By looking at how new stories are actually produced, the author highlights the elusiveness of the goal of "objective" journalism and illustrates how the biases of war correspondents are constrained by the powers of government and how these biases are translated into actual journalistic practices.

David Greenway, a journalist’s journalist in the tradition of Michael Herr, David Halberstam, and Dexter Filkins. In this vivid memoir, he tells us what it’s like to report a war up close. Reporter David Greenway was at the White House the day Kennedy was assassinated. He was in the jungles of Vietnam in that war’s most dangerous days, and left Saigon by helicopter from the American embassy as the city was falling. He was with Sean Flynn when Flynn decided to get an entire New Guinea village high on hash, and with him hours before he disappeared in Cambodia. He escorted John le Carre around South East Asia as he researched The Honourable Schoolboy. He was wounded in Vietnam and awarded a Bronze Star for rescuing a Marine. He was with Sidney Schanberg and Dith Pran in Phnom Penh before the city descended into the killing fields of the Khmer Rouge. Greenway covered Sadat in Jerusalem, civil war and bombing in Lebanon, ethnic cleansing and genocide the Balkans, the Gulf Wars (both), and reported from Afghanistan and Iraq as they collapsed into civil war. This is a great adventure story—the life of a war correspondent on the front lines for five decades, eye-witness to come of the most violent and heroic scenes in recent history.

From Alan Furst, whom The New York Times calls “America’s preeminent spy novelist,” comes an epic story of romantic love, love of country, and love of freedom–the story of a secret war fought in elegant hotel bars and first-class railway cars, in the mountains of Spain and the backstreets of Berlin. It is an inspiring, thrilling saga of everyday people forced by their hearts’ passion to fight in the war against tyranny. By 1938, hundreds of Italian intellectuals, lawyers and journalists, university professors and scientists had escaped Mussolini’s fascist government and taken refuge in Paris. There, amid the struggles of émigré life, they founded an Italian resistance, with an underground press that smuggled news and encouragement back to Italy. Fighting fascism with typewriters, they produced 512 clandestine newspapers. The Foreign Correspondent is their story. Paris, a winter night in 1938: a murder/suicide at a discreet lovers’ hotel. But this is no romantic traged–it is the work of the OVRA, Mussolini’s fascist secret police, and is meant to eliminate the editor of Liberazione, a clandestine émigré newspaper. Carlo Weisz, who has fled from Trieste and secured a job as a foreign correspondent with the Reuters bureau, becomes the new editor. Weisz is, at that moment, in Spain, reporting on the last campaign of the Spanish civil war. But as soon as he returns to Paris, he is pursued by the French Sûreté, by agents of the OVRA, and by officers of the British Secret Intelligence Service. In the desperate politics of Europe on the edge of war, a foreign correspondent is a pawn, worth surveillance, or blackmail, or murder. The Foreign Correspondent is the story of Carlo Weisz and a handful of antifascists: the army officer known as “Colonel Ferrara,” who fights for a lost cause in Spain; Arturo Salamone, the shrewd leader of a resistance group in Paris; and Christa von Schirren, the woman who becomes the love of Weisz’s life, herself involved in a doomed resistance underground in Berlin. The Foreign Correspondent is Alan Furst at his absolute best–taut and powerful, enigmatic and romantic, with sharp, seductive writing that takes the reader through darkness and intrigue to a spectacular denouement.