'Foreign news' returns to U.S. press

By Edward Neilan

American editors are realizing what European and Asian news executives knew all along: readers relate to international events.

KOBE, Japan (JP): "Foreign news" is being rediscovered by the American press.

For most of the world's editors, foreign news has not been MIA (missing in action) as it has been in the United States.

Only in the U.S., where panic over declining circulation and falling advertising revenues a decade ago led to wholesale sacking of foreign correspondents and signing up of "focus groups" to decide what should go in the paper, has there been such a turning inward of news judgment.

A "focus group" is a band of citizens rounded up by editors to make the decisions that the editors should have been making in the first place, by themselves. Editors are supposed to be leaders, not followers.

Here in Kobe, the attendees at the 51st World Association of Newspapers (WAN) Congress heard industry leaders talk about international news as being no different, no less important than "local" news.

Lachlan Murdoch, son of media mogul Rupert Murdoch and now head of News Limited of Australia, spoke of "harnessing creativity" to guarantee the future of newspapers. The serious challenge from interactive or Internet media is still a ways down the road, he said.

And you'd like Leslie Fong, editor of the Straits Times of Singapore. He's spending US$6 million this year on foreign bureaus in order to bring to readers of his highly-successful paper the meaning of the world in a Singapore context.

It is understandable that readers in places like Seoul, Taipei, Jakarta, Tokyo, and Honolulu feel more comfortable with international news than readers in Kansas City, Albuquerque, Nashville, or Minneapolis (Voice offstage: "It's the geography, stupid!").

But international business and improved communication are changing that perception.

Meanwhile in Moscow (I'd rather be in Kobe; So would Marilyn Greene of the World Press Freedom Committee. "We asked for an extra pitcher of water at Moscow's best hotel and the sulking waiter refused, telling us: 'One pitcher for each table.'" In Japan, any request is met immediately, with civility), editors were warned against cutting international coverage.

Speaking at the International Press Institute (IPI) conference in Moscow, American newspaper editors warned that a lack of international coverage is hurting the public.

Edward Seaton, new president of the American Society of Newspaper Editors (ASNE) and editor-in-chief of the Manhattan (Kans.) Mercury, said that since 1971 the amount of space devoted to foreign news in American papers has fallen from 10.2 percent to less than 2 percent.

"An uninformed public offers opportunities for demagogues and enemies to cause serious harm," he said, adding that the majority of existing coverage consists of "10 inches about mayhem that presents the world as a series of unconnected disasters."

According to Philip Gailey, editor and publisher of the St. Petersburg (Fla.) Times, the lack of coverage means that the American public lacks a clear grasp of international affairs, and so allows foreign policy to be driven by government officials rather than influencing those policies.

"There are no giants in the American foreign policy establishment these days only small politicians constantly calculating the domestic political pluses and minuses of every foreign policy move," Gailey said.

Calling Americans' lack of interest in world affairs a "comfortable illusion," Gailey added that, "My belief is that if [Americans] don't care, at least in part, it is because they've been lulled into believing that what happens overseas will have no real impact on their own lives."

On taking over ASNE leadership, Seaton launched a program to make global news within the reaches of community newspapers of all sizes.

Seaton said: "It is an effort to look at how we are using international news with an emphasis on helping readers figure out how international forces are affecting and changing their communities and their lives."

He said the emphasis on international news -- "we should banish the word 'foreign' when talking about news and correspondents. How parochial can we get?" -- benefited from timing.

People were tiring of White House sex scandal allegations and O.J.Simpson-type trials that seemed to parody the justice system. The President Clinton China visit and U.S. China policy ramifications began to intrigue readers as did the altered power balances emerging from the India and Pakistan nuclear tests.

Seaton will organize a series of roundtables with Freedom Forum backing to take the concept of increased international news to smaller communities.

Recent readership polls show the turnaround in preferences. Readers are interested in international news and columns dealing with lifestyles, human interest, environment, drug traffic, crime and jobs more than "diplomatic doubletalk."

There needs to be a rekindling of interest among younger journalists in foreign reporting. "There was a time, before the days of working spouses, when reporters would kill for a foreign assignment," said columnist Tom Winship, former editor of the Boston Globe.