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Journalism Studies
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LOOKING FORWARD
Serge Schmemann
Published online: 09 Sep 2010.

To cite this article: Serge Schmemann (2010) LOOKING FORWARD, Journalism Studies, 11:5,
761-763, DOI: 10.1080/1461670X.2010.503025

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 LOOKING FORWARD
The future of foreign correspondence

Serge Schmemann

At the height of the Greek debt crisis, I chanced to be on the phone with the editor
of a major Athens daily and, making small talk, said he must be awfully busy. He was, he
said*laying off the reporters he so desperately needed to cover the crisis. Tell me about
it, I thought to myself. The world is changing and moving in ways that will profoundly
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affect the future*the United States is mired in two confusing wars, new economic powers
flex their muscles, old ones groan under debilitating crises, nasty regimes develop nuclear
bombs, the planet is rapidly heating up, pirates roam the seas*yet foreign reporting in
the American media (as in Greece’s) is on the wane, especially in the quality media.
That, in its sad way, is the starting point for most of the essays in this special issue.
Beyond that, however, most of them run smack into the question that bedevils all of us
who try to make sense of what is happening to the media: what it is we’re lamenting. We
complain that foreign reporting is on the wane, yet we are getting more information from
abroad than ever before. What is ‘‘foreign reporting’’? As Don Oberdorfer of the
Washington Post is quoted as saying in the introduction by John Maxwell Hamilton and
Regina G. Lawrence, ‘‘We’re in a new era now in which the ambiguity in what is
international and what is not international is very great.’’ That’s not the only ambiguity.
What is ‘‘news media’’? Do Facebook or Twitter and other new forms of mass
communications really qualify as ‘‘journalism’’? We can all identify ‘‘quality journalism’’*
I am gratified to note that my illustrious master, The New York Times, figures prominently
on these pages as an example of it*but can we define it? Raluca Cozma, for one, writes in
her essay that ‘‘Despite an intense discussion regarding the decay of journalistic quality,
few studies have attempted to define quality journalism in a form that makes it possible to
measure empirically.’’
That is not, I make haste to note, a criticism of these studies. In fact, the very absence
of concrete definitions is the message: the journalism we grew up with, the traditional
foreign reporting of the ‘‘mainstream media,’’ the very concept of news media, all are
changing in profound ways. The process is far from over, and the value of the essays in this
volume is to raise the questions we should be addressing.
In the interest of full disclosure, as it has become (correctly) customary to interject,
I, like most reporters of my vintage, have spent many an hour bemoaning the passing of
the good old pre-Internet days when a story was a story, an editor was a schmuck and
foreign correspondents were heroes (often of bad novels written by themselves). And all
the while, one big paper or network after another has shuttered its foreign bureaus, cut
the space devoted to foreign news and laid off our colleagues and friends. All this has
been a source of great anxiety and sadness, as it is for my Greek friend.
But not despair. No, I am convinced that we are not finished.
That doesn’t mean I have any idea where journalism is headed. At The Times and
at its global edition, the wonderfully compact International Herald Tribune for which I
now labor, we spend untold hours sitting around conference tables plotting how to
adapt our industry to the rapidly evolving new forms of instant and borderless digital
Journalism Studies, Vol. 11, No 5, 2010, 761763
ISSN 1461-670X print/1469-9699 online
– 2010 Taylor & Francis DOI: 10.1080/1461670X.2010.503025
 762 SERGE SCHMEMANN

communications. There are few things we haven’t tried: we’ve designed and redesigned
our websites; we’ve ‘‘delivered content’’ (aargh!) to netbooks and smartphones and
tablets via Facebook and Twitter and MySpace and Linkedin; we have gone through all
the doomsday scenarios and all the illusory solutions. And, as of this writing, we do not
know how newsgathering will be financed in the future, or in what form news will be
delivered when the dust settles.
What we do know is that there will be news to deliver. I admit we panicked when
the Internet first attacked us, even though we knew that earlier revolutions in mass media,
most notably the rise of radio and then television, ended up contributing new ways to
deliver quality reporting without destroying the old. But the Internet seemed to challenge
all the old ways*anyone could be a reporter, and everything was ‘‘out there’’ for free. The
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panic has subsided. The Web has been an integral part of our lives now for at least
a decade, and we’ve learned that a random flood of images and sound bites is not useful
journalism. Yes, instantly disseminated images of riots and police brutality can and do
arouse passions, which in turn do have political consequences. Yes, the Internet can be
awfully useful. But as my colleague Tom Friedman is quoted as saying of the Internet, ‘‘at
its ugliest, [it] is just an open sewer: an electronic conduit for untreated, unfiltered
information.’’ Steven Livingston and Gregory Asmolov are right when they ask on these
pages, ‘‘Do we understand Iranian politics any more clearly because of seeing Neda’s last
moments on YouTube, or tracking post-election violence on a GIS application? . . . Without
direction from a trusted interpreter of events on the ground, someone very much like a
traditional foreign correspondent, will anyone know to look? Will anyone care?’’ Their
answer, which is also my answer: ‘‘In the end, technology may well be no substitute for
a good reporter.’’
‘‘Good reporter.’’ So, here again, like ‘‘quality journalism,’’ our authors run up against
something that cannot be measured empirically. But does it need to be? I confess I take
a bit of childish delight in reading essays that put foreign reporting into an academic
context, such as those in this issue. I know there’s nothing surprising in this; I know that
a free press is an indispensable pillar of a democratic society, demanding of study, analysis
and criticism. But news reporting is not a science. It’s a craft, defined by tradition and
ethics and practiced in a very broad range of styles by people who often have no formal
training and no academic grounding in their subject. There’s an unspoken convention
among American newsmen and newswomen by which they affect a certain blue-collar
persona. We do not usually call ourselves ‘‘journalists,’’ the way the rest of the world does,
we call ourselves reporters, and we call our articles ‘‘stories.’’ We don’t resent the ‘‘Front
Page’’ stereotype of a fast-talking cynic who yells ‘‘Give me rewrite!’’, drinks scotch straight
and tells editor jokes (Mark Twain: ‘‘I am not an editor of a newspaper, and shall always try
to do right and be good so that God will not make me one’’). When I was starting out at
the Associated Press city desk in New York, I asked Tom Harris, a desk editor, why he
decided to become a journalist. ‘‘When I become one I’ll let you know,’’ he replied in his
soft Mississippi drawl. (I guess Harris never did become one*he went on to become the
best-selling creator of Hannibal Lecter.)
Perhaps it’s precisely because it’s difficult to define a good reporter that we lament
the reduction in foreign reporters. Numbers created competition and variety. I was
a reporter for 30 years, most of them abroad (I’m still abroad, if Paris can be called that, but
I’m editor of an op-ed page now), and I was always being struck by how two or more
reporters, reporting from the same country at the same time, would produce amazingly
 LOOKING FORWARD 763

different work. I’m not talking about straight news stories here, which will inevitably be
similar, but about the in-depth features that explain a foreign culture to readers back
home*the stories that are the real mission of a foreign correspondent.
In the end, whether you call it ‘‘reporting’’ or ‘‘journalism’’; whether we ‘‘do stories,’’
‘‘write articles’’ or ‘‘generate content,’’ the journalism that this special issue is about is the
product of standards, ethics and traditions that have evolved to satisfy the demand of
a democratic public for unbiased and useful information. No, it is not ‘‘objective’’*I tend
to agree with the position of Alain de Pouzilhac, CEO of the France 24 news program who
is quoted by Phil Seib above saying, ‘‘Objectivity doesn’t exist in the world. Honesty exists.
Impartiality exists. But objectivity doesn’t exist.’’ News reporting is by definition a process
of selecting information and placing it in context. And quality journalism, at least for most
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of my career, has meant above all honesty, impartiality and fairness. (I tried to explain the
distinction between objectivity and fairness in one of the first interviews with a foreign
correspondent ever aired on Soviet television*an early product of Mikhail Gorbachev’s
glasnost. The wily interviewer cut everything from the conversation except my statement
that the Western press was not objective. At this, he looked sadly at the camera, as if to
say, Didn’t we tell you so?)
Phil Seib raises one of the more troubling themes in this issue, the rise of what he
calls ‘‘public diplomacy’’ journalism, which ranges from state-supported media to outlets
that promote a specific ideology. Seib suggests, correctly, I think, that stations such as Al
Jazeera serve a useful role in providing news from a different point of view than the major
Western news organizations. But the danger, which he does not address, is that the spread
of such deliberately tilted news organizations feeds a notion among consumers that all
news is biased, and that they should choose the outlet which most closely reflects their
particular bias. The attendant loss of the ideal of unbiased news can only be regretted.
My point here is not to rehash Journalism 101. It is simply to support what I see as
the main take-away of this special issue, which is that quality journalism and unbiased
reporting are as valid and necessary today as they ever were, and that 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’’*an idea we pooh-poohed when it was
pursued by the Third World in the 1970s, but now imposed by the Internet*remains true
to the ideals and traditions that define our journalism.

Serge Schmemann, Editorial Page Editor, International Herald Tribune, 6 bis, rue des
Graviers, 92521 Neuilly-sur-Seine, France. E-mail: sschmemann@iht.com