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"People have overpredicted the death of the evening news for a long time," said David Westin, president of ABC News, at the sixtieth anniversary of the Council on Foreign Relations' (CFR) Edward R. Murrow Press Fellowship program. "Even if they don't have the time to tune in at 6:30 at night," he said, the audience gets the evening news on the Web, via streaming video and other media. He was part of a panel that included three network news presidents: CBS's Sean McManus, NBC's Stephen Capus, and Westin, along with CNN/U.S. president Jonathan Klein. Ken Auletta, media writer for the New Yorker, moderated.

The business of media was the subject for Journalism Online's L. Gordon Crovitz, CBS News vice president Christopher Isham, Columbia University School of Journalism dean Nicholas Lemann, and GlobalPost executive editor Charles M. Sennott. Lemann asserted that "pure market forces, will not, in and of themselves, support the kind of overseas reporting that our society and other societies in the world need." However, he added, "if you take the economics out of the picture, we've never had it so good; if you're a consumer of journalism, it's paradise right now," referring to the breadth of information available today. Sennott cited the benefits of technology, such as blogging and video reporting, for on-the-ground freelance reporters. John Hockenberry, host of Takeaway on WNYC Radio, moderated the discussion.

Christiane Amanpour, CNN's chief international correspondent, moderated a panel with this year's Edward R. Murrow Press Fellow Kim Barker, CFR Adjunct Senior Fellow Mohamad Bazzi, AP's Kathy Gannon, and Newsweek's Christopher Dickey on the perils of reporting from war zones. Reflecting on recent reporting assignments in Afghanistan, Gannon expressed how real the dangers are not only for journalists but for others: "A big concern is our fixers and our translators," she said. "We take risks unnecessarily with them. We aren't being responsible enough about them."

Margaret G. Warner, senior correspondent for the News- Hour with Jim Lehrer, looked at the risks of reporting from closed societies with independent journalist Caryle M. Murphy, New Yorker editor David J. Remnick, New York Times

Magazine contributing writer Elizabeth Rubin, and Radio Free Asia's Dan Southerland. Citing Iran and China as examples, the speakers said that while foreign correspondents are not allowed to report freely from these restrictive societies, the information is increasingly being disseminated by people on the ground through various technological tools.

Summing up the conference on her blog on PBS.org, Warner concluded that "there is still quality overseas reporting being done by American journalists, but the old model of foreign correspondent- a reporter living in a country for years, learning the language and culture, the political players and tensions-is going the way of the teletype machine."

Click here to view the newly launched Edward R. Murrow Press Fellowship website.

Special thanks to the Ford Foundation and Time Warner, Inc. for their generous support of this event. If you would like more information about the Ford Foundation Challenge Grant to sustain the Murrow Fellowship and related programming, please contact L. Camille Massey, vice president, membership, fellowship, and corporate affairs.