Majority of media agencies are pressured to generate increasing profits. Generally, media agencies closed their foreign bureaus down as a measure to save costs. As per Washington Post’s journalist Pamela Constable has stated– the cost to run a foreign bureau is exuberant, for instance, “a typical newspaper bureau overseas costs at least $250,000 a year, according to foreign editors, and a large, security-conscious news operation in the city such as Baghdad can hemorrhage four times that”. So, instead of running staffed-offices overseas, media agencies opt for more cost efficient options– keen freelancers and mobile media.
Highly qualified foreign correspondents in general are argued to be a dying breed, as they are slowly “replaced” by newer breeds of journalists such as embedded journalists and freelanced “stringers” (Novakovic, 2011). So in what way are media agencies saving money? Firstly, as embedded journalists and freelancers are not stationed overseas, therefore do not live overseas; most of the time media agencies do not have to pay for the journalists to settle in. Journalists who are embedded with government organisations overseas, say the Australian Defence Force for example, usually travel, eat and sleep with the soldiers. Hence, these costs are paid by tax-payers, not the media agencies they work for. And as mentioned above, neither do they have to pay the costs of running bureaus overseas. Secondly, with freelancers, media agencies do not pay them a regular wage and staff benefits– instead, they are paid per coverage and for the work they put in– contrary to the costs involved in employing foreign correspondents. Freelancers also help cover more remote or incremental stories, and newswire agencies can cover breaking news in global hot spots.
The next questions are– if they do not have bureaus overseas, what resources are the journalists working with? And how do they broadcast or present news coverages to the audience back at home? With new and mobile information technology, they can– effortlessly and quickly– wherever they are. With laptops, wireless internet coverage, the new generation compact satellite phones, digital voice recorders, and camera mobile and smart phones, more often than not embedded journalists and freelancers digitally record their news coverages and wirelessly send their works back to their editors, who are based locally. Mobile information technology has enabled journalists to cover and transcribe or broadcast news on the move, making them a more appealing option– to media agencies looking to save costs. Hence again, in terms of costs, there is very little need for agencies to maintain bureaus overseas, and more cost efficient to have roving embedded journalists and freelancers than foreign correspondents who live and work overseas.
The demise of Foreign Correspondent is also arguably due to the qualifications and experience sought after in foreign correspondents, by media agencies. As foreign correspondents are often expected (though not necessarily required) to have “thorough grounding” (Novakovic, 2011) “in the language, history and cultures of the country or countries they aspire to report” (Hodge 1999, p. 122), many newer generation journalists opt to fast track their career by working as “stringers” (Novakovic, 2011). And it becomes a vicious cycle. Hence contributing to what is arguably the demise of Foreign Correspondent.
Another contributing factor is internet. Certain websites accessible via the internet become news coverage sources for “foreign correspondents”, based locally– “foreign correspondents based in Australia have rated web sites as their most useful source of information” and the “search engine Yahoo rated 9th” (Knight, 2001). This implies that foreign correspondents need not be posted overseas to cover news stories.
As per Constable, in the United States the number of foreign correspondents had declined “from 188 to 141”, between 2002 and 2006 alone. Constable also reports that only “four American papers still maintain significant numbers” of correspondents based overseas.
Australia is advancing with the rest of the developed world in technology, and thanks to marketing, consumers are becoming more and more tech savvy. So do I think Australian media are grappling with the same problem? Yes and no. Yes, because some media agencies are pressured to make profits, therefore they would be looking at cost efficient methods. Newspapers more so, because of information technology and mobile media, people are leaning towards paperless media.
