Timeless essentials of foreign reporting are key amid changes wrought by technology, says panel

A panel on foreign correspondents, appearing at a National Press Club Foreign Correspondents Committee event March 29, emphasized the importance of timeless essentials of foreign reporting amid the changes wrought by technology.

Giovanna Dell’Orto, a former AP reporter and current associate professor at the University of Minnesota, summarized the results of interviewing 61 Associated Press reporters for her recent book “AP Foreign Correspondents in Action: World War II to the Present.”

“Three foundational reporting practices kept coming up in interviews,” she said. The first is identifying the story, which involves tension between what the correspondents find important and what will appeal to a general audience, she said.

The second practice is to find sources. “It is tremendously time-consuming to get folks in a foreign society – both holding court in palaces and squatting under highway bridges – to talk on the record,” she said, adding that the interviews can be dangerous for both the reporter and the source.

She quoted Terril Jones, a journalist who interviewed and identified student protesters in China’s Tiananmen Square massacre in 1989. Jones said he remembers “people I have met for just a brief moment, and today suffer really unspeakable consequences as a result.”

The final and third practice, according to Dell’Orto, is the “moral dimension” of revealing the truth, ”If you keep exposing lies, finding truths, bringing out unheard voices, and making readers feel the grit, the dust, the blood and the sweat, maybe somebody somewhere will be moved enough to try to make the world better,” she said.

Myron Belkind, an AP veteran of 42 years and former Club president, who moderated the panel, moved the discussion to the changes in foreign reporting wrought by technology. He cited the contrast between his reporting from India at the beginning of his career and the present.

When he began, correspondents had to send telegrams, with attendant delays, yet diplomats could send their reports directly by diplomatic cables, he observed. Now instant communication via social media scoops diplomatic channels, he said.

Matthew Pennington, an AP reporter covering Asia-related foreign policy from Washington, who previously reported from overseas, continued the emphasis on technology by contrasting reporting in the mid-1990s with the present.

Wire services, he said, “had a monopoly on reporting international news and spreading it in real time. But now it’s open season. A tweet can move markets as well as an AP story can.”

With the multiple sources of information coming to people, it is important to have reliable sources of information, such as the wire services and reputable papers like The New York Times, he said.

“We’re more nervous than ever to really get it right,” he observed.

He identified a trend in the AP toward fewer stories, but stories that are more in depth.

In response to questions about limited insightful coverage of ISIS in the press, Pennington contrasted ISIS with the PLO and Al Qaeda in other years. Both terrorist organizations (the PLO was once considered such by the United States) needed the media to get their stories out, but ISIS handles its own social media very effectively for both terrorism and recruiting, he said. Consequently ISIS doesn’t offer journalists protected opportunities for interviews, and security needs hamper coverage, he explained.

Commenting on the role of the media in government, Jordan Tama, assistant professor of international relations at American University’s School of International Service who specializes in the formation of U.S. foreign and national security policy, said: “The reality is that people in government rely heavily on the media for information about everything.”
This is true even of the intelligence community, for whom “open sources” are important, he added.

However, the evidence of the influence of the media on policy making is mixed, he observed. Most often, he said, the media affects policy in cases of humanitarian crises, coverage of which leads the public to urge the government to take action.