Why overseas reporting matters

"The lack of eyes is leaving us partially blind."

That's the conclusion of Mark Seibel, McClatchy's managing editor, who has written a candid piece on the state of international reporting by US news outlets like ours.

In the Nieman Reports piece, Mark offers a blunt assessment of how McClatchy is trying to continue doing international reporting at a time when all our papers, facing dismal financial conditions, are laying off staff covering local news.

"We are not running at full steam in a world that deserves it," Mark wrote. "We’ve had a South Asia bureau in our budget for the past three years; I’m certain it will never open. The persistent hiring freeze has kept us from filling the Mexico City bureau with a full-time correspondent, even as drug crime explodes. When Hannah Allam took her leave to join the 2009 class of Nieman Fellows, we couldn’t replace her, and Egypt remained vacant. Her Cambridge time ends just as our Baghdad bureau chief, Leila Fadel, rotates home, and she won’t be replaced; we’ll cover Iraq with reporters rotated in from the United States, and Hannah knows that she’ll be spending much of her time there, too. China, too, lies fallow; Tim Johnson has gone off to write a book. We’ll rotate people in for six weeks at a stretch, but a lot of expertise will go missing."

McClatchy's leadership has fought long-and-hard to retain our overseas bureaus and continue with our international reporting.

We sent State Department reporter Warren Strobel to Iran to cover the elections. We sent White House reporter Margaret Talev to Cairo and France to cover Obama's recent trip. I just returned from helping cover Obama in Cairo and reporting on the election in Lebanon - and I am soon heading to Saudi Arabia. Shashank Bengali continues to travel Africa chasing pirates, covering Darfur and reporting from war zones across the continent. Tom Lasseter was recently threatened by Hamid Karzai's brother while reporting on the drug trade in Afghanistan. Pentagon reporter (and former Baghdad bureau chief) Nancy Youssef is heading to Afghanistan next week.

The list of McClatchy reporters still working overseas goes on.

As noted here in April, the number of reporters in Jerusalem is also rapidly dwindling.

Some argue that we are all well-served by the wire services, local papers and reporters from the UK and elsewhere who continue to report on world events.

But wire service reporters are often overwhelmed trying to cover the daily news that they don't have time to look into more substantive issues. And the fewer eyes we have that are able to look in the shadows, question the conventional wisdom and examine the issues, the less we will know.

Mark recently discussed the state of affairs on NPR's "On The Media." You can hear the report here:

Comments

[borisjimski]

Gee, I wonder if Faux Noise will take up any of the slack with their foul and biased reporting?