Digital News Journalist

About Lonnie Isabel Lonnie Isabel is an associate professor and director of international reporting at the CUNY Graduate School of Journalism. He spent 28 years as a newspaper reporter and editor, most recently as deputy managing editor of Newsday, where he was responsible for foreign coverage. Hear Lonnie's podcasts on Reporter's Notebook.

Mara Schiavocampo’s job title at NBC Nightly News is digital correspondent. Hired in 2007, she was the first reporter in network television to hold that job.

When I asked her if there would be a time when such a title would be an oxymoron, she said simply that that time is now.

Schiavocampo has the job many of my students, all aspiring foreign correspondents, want most. With her wheel-on backpack, she goes off to assignments in places like Haiti, Lebanon and Ghana. She blogs, takes still photos, files broadcast pieces for the nightly news and for MSNBC.com, often as her own one-woman video and audio crew.

NBC, like most of so-called mainstream media, has sharply reduced or outright eliminated its foreign newsgathering operations in the past five years. Always the most expensive and perceived by many even inside the industry as the most expendable form of reporting, foreign news gathering has taken a body blow in the dramatically changing economic environment and the digital refiguring of journalism.

But in the supposed ashes of the crash burning of foreign reporting, Schiavocampo and others see a bright future.

“I’m very optimistic,” she said. “We’re finding new ways to tell stories. Things are changing in a way that makes foreign reporting better and more exciting.”

In my shortened career as an editor at Newsday, a paper like several others that closed all of its foreign bureaus, I saw the quick emergence of the advantages of technology in gathering and dispersing foreign news. Satellite phones themselves were remarkably useful as replacements for the scratchy, impossibly unpredictable service from some countries. Transmission of stories in the first Gulf War was possible at times only through cable. Earlier, photographers and broadcast journalists who covered big events like the Iran hostage crisis at times would have to put their film on a plane to get it out to their news organizations.

Schiavocampo, who started out on a traditional path, pursuing a job as a news producer, wanted to be a foreign correspondent. So she left to pitch stories as a print reporter. She added the other skills to meet market demand as a freelancer. NBC noticed and hired her. In that wheel-on backpack, she fits her cameras, two laptops, lights, cables, a tripod and a boom microphone. It all goes in the overhead bin.

Like me, Charles M. Sennott had been a newspaperman his entire career until the Boston Globe closed all its foreign bureaus three years ago. Sennott, with Philip S. Balboni, started Global Post early last year.

“My thinking,” he said as he drove (hands-free) to work in Boston one morning last month, “was 100 percent in the direction of the digital age.”

Global Post is an unquestioned journalistic success with more than 70 correspondents under contract in almost 50 countries, and an ever increasing number of daily hits from not only this country but around the world. Many of the reporters are foreign correspondents who lost their jobs in the abrupt downsizing. But some are talented younger correspondents who never worked for a newspaper or broadcast foreign bureau. Sennott, the executive editor, runs the multi-media website almost as a traditional foreign desk, with assigning editors and copy editors on staff.

“We’re able to put together multi-media packages that are like the best of what was being done when newspapers had foreign bureaus,” he said. “And we’re doing this for the American news consumer. Sure, lots of material is available online from the BBC and other sources. But Americans need foreign reporting that’s geared toward their interests and experiences.”

Sennott is a boisterous personality, passionate about keeping foreign reporting alive. He sees the digital tools available to foreign reporters as a means, not an end, to the pursuit that he has dedicated his professional life to with many years as a correspondent in the Middle East. He continues to report himself, and was particularly proud of this audio slide show he did with photographer Seamus Murphy that accompanied an article from Afghanistan, headlined “Life Death and the Taliban.”

But while the prospects for great journalism are evident in the digital age, the same dogged questions of economic sustainability are on Sennott’s mind a lot these days, as with all of us who love foreign reporting. Global Post seeks advertising and offers a premium subscription service. It pays its correspondents a flat salary that is not comparable to a newspaper and certainly not a broadcast salary for foreign correspondents. It also offers stock incentives.

“I’m really sad that the luxury is gone from having one news organization that took care of you and provided a steady salary, security and benefits for you and your family. It was a wonderful time but that’s over. We have to move on and that’s what we’re doing here. No one knows if Global Post or any other new venture will make it. But foreign news is so important that we have to try.”

The journalist, professor and journalism historian John Maxwell Hamilton, sees Global Post and other ventures not as the dying gasps of foreign reporting, but as a natural progression of an ever-changing environment for foreign news. His important new book, “Journalism’s Roving Eye: A History of American Foreign Reporting,” traces the incremental evolution through the colonial period when publishers would go to ships to get reports from passengers through various technological, economic and political developments to today.

Prof. Hamilton’s conclusion is that we are in a new stage that he has called the confederacy of foreign correspondents. In this new world, that traditional path of correspondents working for a news organization as described by Sennott is only one of a rich mixture of types of reporters covering foreign news—from reporters at the New York Times to citizen journalists, who used new technologies like cell phone photography and blogging to figure so prominently in the coverage of news events like the Mumbai terrorist attacks, the protests over the Iranian election and the impact of the Iraq war on Iraqis.

In the book, Hamilton, a former foreign correspondent himself and professor at Louisiana State University, describes the eight members of this confederacy, including local foreign correspondents, who write about foreign news from here; foreign foreign correspondents, non-Americans who are often citizens of the country they cover; parachute foreign correspondents, such as Mara Schiavocampo; and premium foreign correspondents, who work for high-cost news services, such as Bloomberg or Dow Jones.

When I caught up with him in his office, Hamilton was as optimistic as Schiavocampo and Sennott.

“First of all, it’s not as if there is going to be one solution to the problem,” he said. “I don’t see this as a collapse of bureaus leading to less coverage. Some organizations have pulled back on bureaus, but some have remained strong. The bureau concept has changed. The ability to travel efficiently with reduced equipment and with less people saves time and costs.”

Hamilton argues that foreign reporters have always been in short supply and that foreign news has always had the lowest audience of readers.

“It has always evolved slowly and been the most susceptible to changes in technology and economic conditions. But now we have a much greater variety of information available and a wider variety of the types of reporting and reporters available. We are now seeing an adjustment to the changes. In foreign reporting in particular, and journalism in general, it has been a constant adjustment to change. And it survives through the efforts of the journalists.”