[Infowarrior] - Jill Carroll Criticizes Foreign Cutbacks in Harvard Report

[Richard Forno]

Jill Carroll Criticizes Foreign Cutbacks in Harvard Report

http://editorandpublisher.com/eandp/news/article_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=
1003535593&imw=Y
By Joe Strupp

Published: January 23, 2007 11:05 AM ET updated Tuesday

NEW YORK Jill Carroll, the Christian Science Monitor reporter who spent more
than 80 days in captivity in Iraq last year before being freed following an
international call for her release, is criticizing cutbacks in foreign news
coverage in a new report she authored for the Shorenstein Center at Harvard
University.

Researched and written during her fellowship at the Shorenstein Center on
the Press, Politics and Public Policy last fall, Carroll's 23-page report
claims that media companies cutting back on foreign bureaus and
correspondents in the face of financial pressure "are making a financial
miscalculation and missing an opportunity to capitalize on an asset that
they appear to undervalue."

Carroll, who was kidnapped just over a year ago in Baghdad during an
incident in which her driver was killed, followed her release last spring by
writing an extensive series on her 82-day ordeal, which also included online
video interviews and became the Monitor's most popular syndicated series and
web-based report. She took a leave of absence from the paper during the fall
semester at Harvard, where she was one of four such fellows.

Her critical report includes statistics that note the number of foreign
correspondents at U.S. newspapers had dropped from 282 in 2000 to 249 in
2006. She also points out that the number of foreign bureaus at the three
major networks had "dropped significantly since 9/11. ABC, NBC and CBS all
had six foreign bureaus by the summer of 2003, according to American
Journalism Review, after ABC and NBC cut seven and CBS cut four bureaus
since the 1980's.

She also notes several reader polls, claiming their findings indicate a
healthy appetite among readers and viewers for overseas news.

"Good quality foreign news coverage is in fact in demand by readers and
viewers. It adds significant value to a medium but in ways that can't always
be directly measured by net profits," Carroll writes. "Higher quality
employees, greater credibility and exclusive stories are all a result of
having one's own staff providing good quality foreign news coverage. These
benefits strengthen the medium as an organization and when factored into a
cost-benefit calculation, the costs associated with producing good quality
foreign news coverage begin to seem like a bargain."

When noting companies that have hit hardest in reducing their foreign
coverage, Carroll says that "the starkest example is Tribune Company. It is
shuttering the Baltimore Sun's and Newsday's foreign bureaus and will rely
instead on Tribune system reporters overseas. The rationale is that
Tribune's Los Angeles Times and Chicago Tribune will handle the bureau
reporting and that doing this will also eliminate overlap with other papers
in the chain.

"But one of the things the Sun and Newsday were particularly well known for
was their ambitious foreign coverage. They distinguished themselves from
average metro daily newspapers by having their own foreign staff-even if
only a handful of correspondents. Their investment in original foreign
coverage is often what made them great and not just average. But at small
and mid-sized papers the fad solution to the industry's struggle to maintain
20% profit margins is to focus more on local news."

Carroll, who is set to return to the Monitor for an as yet undisclosed
assignment, ends the report by claiming the foreign coverage element of U.S.
news operations should not be allowed to shrink further: "The quality of the
information provided by the news media determines to a large extent the
quality of the national debate and resulting policies. Having many sources
of good quality, in-depth, insightful, well-informed foreign reporting is
essential to keeping the national debate vigorous and churning. This moral
argument won't hold sway in many boardrooms, but the financial incentives to
produce good quality foreign news should. Hopefully financial decision
makers will have the foresight to realize they are drastically undervaluing
foreign news coverage and have the wisdom to hang onto and invest in this
valuable asset."

The entire report is availabe at the Shorenstein Web site,
http://www.ksg.harvard.edu/presspol/index.htm