Abroad, now...

My old boss Richard Sambrook has finally handed in his homework - a scholarly paper for the Reuters Institute of Journalism, with the slightly rhetorical title "Are Foreign Correspondents Redundant ?". The answer takes 115 pages, with only one photo on the cover, and all the footnotes an Institute might expect after a spell in the groves of academe.  

Richard ran BBC News and BBC Global News, but like a good phone-in producer, chooses a provocative question, which is worth mulling over.  Some foreign correspondents are redundant, in the sense that Western news organisations have been cutting back full-time jobs based abroad steadily over twenty years.  Some newspapers and broadcasters have cut back so far, that for them, foreign correspondents are redundant, as in "unnecessary"; they fill their output from agencies and other sources as and when necessary. Richard himself argues that the word "foreign" may be unnecessary now - in the sense that in a world made smaller by instant communications, the differences between reporting at home and abroad are fewer than they were.  And can you manage without correspondents/reporters, in a world of live press conferences and Twitter ?

In the longer answer, there's rich material about the new drivers of reporting abroad.  But, whoever they serve, and whatever the output for their stories, there will always be those who want to travel the world and see it changing first hand.  Their individual survival in the job depends on the quality of their story-telling - and their honesty. Their future lies with the people who follow behind Richard looking after their careers, and their safety.