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Many lament the decline in the number of foreign correspondents, writes Jack Hamilton in the Columbia Review of Journalism, but foreign coverage is entering yet a new era with a clear defining feature: many types of foreign correspondents operating at once.
Some months ago, while exploring files in the nearly empty, ink-blackened basement of the old New York Times building on West Forty-third Street in Manhattan, I came across a 1968 memorandum from Seymour Topping. The longtime foreign correspondent had just been put in charge of foreign news, and his memo outlined the changes he planned.
The emphasis on getting spot news first, Topping argued, was outmoded. This he chalked up to the "special challenge" of electronic journalism, with around-the-clock radio news and what he perceived as the glimmerings of real-time television coverage. "Foreign news dispatches on news agency printers," he noted, are "shown on TV screens at about the same time those dispatches come into the wireroom."