Web sites
Backpack journalism
Bill Gentile’s blog
http://billgentilebackpackjournalism.blogspot.com/
Country information
BBC News
http://news.bbc.co.uk/
The New York Times
www.nytimes.com/pages/world/index.html
The CIA World Factbook
https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/
Funding for international reporting
International Reporting Project
http://www.internationalreportingproject.org/
Pulitzer Center for Crisis Reporting
http://www.pulitzercenter.org/
Health
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s traveler’s health site wwwnc.cdc.gov/travel/default.aspx
World Health Organization
www.who.int/ith/en/
International media
Global Voices Online
http://www.globalvoicesonline.org/
International Center for Journalists
www.icfj.org/
International Newspaper Linkswww.newspaperlinks.com/home.cfm?mid=int
News Voyager
http://www.newspaperlinks.com/home.cfm?mid=int
Worldpress.org
http://www.worldpress.org/
World Net Daily
http://www.wnd.com/
Internet availability, filtering
OpenNet Initiative
http://opennet.net/
Languages
BBC Languages
www.bbc.co.uk/languages/
Miscellaneous
American Citizens Abroad
http://www.aca.ch/joomla/index.php
Demotix citizen journalism/photo agency site
http://www.demotix.com/: You post your photos, they try to sell them, you split the take 50-50; you keep the copyright. Also offers opportunity to exchange posts with other members of the site.
http://www.danbaum.com/Nine_Lives/Blog/Blog.html - Writer Dan Baum’s blog on making a living as a writer.
http://www.theproposalfactory.com/ – Veteran writer Dan Baum’s site proposing to help you with proposals, and get you to read his articles and maybe buy his books. Includes a pdf of a successful proposal he wrote for the New Yorker.
http://www.stateofthemedia.org/2009/narrative_overview_intro.php?cat=0&media=1
The State of the News Media 2009: An Annual Report on American Journalism, Pew Project for Excellence in Journalism
New media
Editorsweblog.org http://www.editorsweblog.org/
International Symposium on Online Journalism
University of Texas at Austin
http://online.journalism.utexas.edu/
Knight Digital Media Center
http://www.knightdigitalmediacenter.org/
Media Bloggers Association
http://www.mediabloggers.org/
MediaShift
http://www.pbs.org/mediashift/
Online Journalism Review
http://www.ojr.org/
Online News Association
http://www.onlinenewsassociation.org/
Photojournalism
World Press Photo
www.worldpressphoto.org/
Press freedom and safety
Committee to Protect Journalists
http://www.cpj.org/
Inter American Press Association
www.sipiapa.com/v4/
International Federation of Journalists
http://www.ifj.org/en
International Freedom of Expression Exchangehttp://www.ifex.org/
Reporters Without Borders
http://www.rsf.org/
Rory Peck Trust
http://www.rorypecktrust.org/
South Asian Journalists Association
www.saja.org/
Think tanks, international affairs
Council on Foreign Relations
http://www.cfr.org/
Brookings Institution
http://www.brookings.edu/World.aspx
International Crisis Group http://www.crisisgroup.org/home/index.cfm
Training
News University
http://www.newsu.org/
Travel
Lonely Planet Guides
http://www.lonelyplanet.com/
U.S. Passports
http://travel.state.gov/passport/passport_1738.html
U.S. Department of State’s Web site for travelers
http://travel.state.gov/
Books
Allan, Stuart. Reporting War: Journalism in Wartime, 2004.
Arnett, Peter. Live From the Battlefield,1994.
Ayres, Chris. War Reporting for Cowards, 2005.
Barnett, Peter. Foreign Correspondence: A Journalist's Biography: Tales from a Life in Australia, Asia, and the United States of America, 2001.
Bartimus, Tad, ed. War Torn: Stories of War from the Women Reporters Who Covered Vietnam, 2002.
Bernstein, Mark and Alex Lubertozzi. World War II On the Air: Edward R. Murrow and the Broadcasts that Riveted a Nation, 2003.
Cloud, Stanley and Lynne Olson. The Murrow Boys, 1996.
Collier, Richard. Fighting Words: The War Correspondents of World War II, 1989.
Colman, Penny. Where the Action Was: Women War Correspondents in World War II, 2002.
El-Nawawy, Mohammed. The Islraeli-Egyptian Peace Process in the Reporting of Western Journalists, 2002.
Elwood-Akers, Virginia. Women War Correspondents in the Vietnam War, 1961-1975, 1988.
Emery, Michael. On the Front Lines: Following America's Foreign Correspondents Across the Twentieth Century, 1995.
Evans, Harold. War Stories: Reporting in the Time of Conflict from the Crimea to Iraq, 2003.
Farrar, Martin J. News from the Front: War Correspondents on the Western Front, 1914-1918, 1998.
Ferrari, Michelle and James Tobin.Reporting America at War: An Oral History, 2003.
Filkins, Dexter. The Forever War, 2008.
Foerstel, Herbert N. Killing the Messenger: Journalists at Risk in Modern Warfare, 2006.
Fralin, Frances. The Indelible Image: Photographs of War - 1846 to the Present, 1985.
Furst, Alan. The Foreign Correspondent, 2006.
Garrels, Anne. Naked in Baghdad: The Iraq War as Seen by NPR's Correspondent Anne Garrels, 2003.
Goodman, Al & John Pollack. (1997). The world on a string: How to become a freelance foreign correspondent. New York: Henry Holt and Company Inc.
Hachten, William A. and James F. Scotton. The World News Prism: Global Media in an Era of Terrorism, 2002.
Hallin, Daniel C. The Uncensored War: The Media and Vietnam, 1986.
Hannerz, Ulf. Foreign News: Exploring the World of Foreign Correspondents (Lewis Henry Morgan Lecture Series), 2004.
Hedges, Chris. War is a Force That Gives Us Meaning, 2002.
Herr, Michael. Dispatches, 1977.
Hess, Stephen. International News & Foreign Correspondence, 1995.
Howe, Peter. Shooting Under Fire: The World of the War Photographer, 2002.
Howell, Haney. Road Runners: Combat Journalists in Cambodia, 1989.
Kusnetz, Marc. Operation Iraqi Freedom: The Inside Story / NBC News, 2003.
Lamb, David. Vietnam, Now: A Reporter Returns, 2002.
Landers, James. The Weekly War: Newsmagazines and Vietnam, 2004.
Levy, David. Reflections of a Moscow Correspondent, 1989.
Lunn, Hugh. Vietnam: A Reporter's War, 1986.
McLaughlin, Greg. The War Correspondent, 2002.
Moore, Molly. A Woman at War: Storming Kuwait with the U.S. Marines, 1993.
Moorehead, Caroline. Martha Gellhorn: A Life, 2003.
Nichols, David, ed. Ernie's War: The Best of Ernie Pyle's World War II Dispatches, 1986.
Pyle, Richard and Horst Faas. Lost Over Laos, 2003.
Raddatz, Martha. The Long Road Home, 2007.
Richburg, Keith B. Out of America: A Black Man Confronts Africa,1997.
Roderick, John. Covering China: The Story of an American Reporter from Revolutionary Days to the Deng Era, 1993.
Safer, Morley. Flashbacks on Returning to Vietnam, 1990.
Said, Edward W. Covering Islam: How the Media and the Experts Determine How We See the Rest of the World, 1997.
Shadid, Anthony. Night Draws Near, 2005.
Simon, Bob. Forty Days, 1992.
Simpson, John. Simpson's World: Dispatches from the Front Lines, 2003.
Smith, Perry M. How CNN Fought the War, 1991.
Sorel, Nancy Caldwell. The Women Who Wrote the War, 1999.
Spinner, Jackie and Jenny Spinner. Tell Them I Didn't Cry: A Young Journalist's Storyof Joy, Loss and Survival in Iraq, 2006.
Steinman, Ron. Inside Television's First War: A Saigon Journal, 2002.
Sylvester, Judith L. and Suzanne Huffman. Reporting from the Front: the Media and the Military, 2005.
Tobin, James. Ernie Pyle's War: America's Eyewitness to World War II, 1997.
Tuohy, William. Dangerous Company, 1987.
Weber, Ronald. News of Paris: American Journalists in the City of Light Between the Wars, 2005.
Woodruff, Bob. In an Instant, 2007.
Film
Foreign Correspondent, 1940. An Alfred Hitchcock thriller with Joel McCrea and Laraine Day about a reporter who tries to expose spies.
The Killing Fields, 1984. Sam Waterston, Haing S. Nor. Based on the story of New York Times reporter Sidney Schanberg and his Cambodian translator in Cambodia at the end of the Vietnam War.
Live from Baghdad, 2002. Helena Bonham Carter, Michael Keaton. About a CNN producer working in Baghdad during the Persian Gulf War.
Missing, 1982. Jack Lemmon, Sissy Spacek. Based on the true story of an America journalist who disappeared after the Chilean coup of 1973.
Salvador, 1986. James Woods, James Belushi.
Under Fire, 1983, Gene Hackman, Nick Nolte, Joanna Cassidy. Two journalists meet during the Nicaraguan revolution.
Welcome to Sarajevo, 1997. Stephen Dillane, Woody Harrelson, Marisa Tomei. A TV journalist rescues a girl from war-ravaged Bosnia.
The Year of Living Dangerously, 1993. Mel Gibson, Sigourney Weaver. Events surrounding an attempted coup in Indonesia in 1965.
Articles
Anft, M. (2009, February). The world in eight weeks. Johns Hopkins Magazine. Retrieved from http://www.jhu.edu/~jhumag/0209web/world.html
Carr, D. (2009, September 27). To cover world, CBS joins with a news site. The New York Times. Retrieved from http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/28/business/media/28cbs.html?_r=3&adxnnl=1&ref=business&adxnnlx=1254143866-YBgnd9IbsMw0WRsyIANVRg
Carroll, J. (2007). Foreign news coverage: U.S. media’s undervalued asset. Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy, Harvard University. Retrieved from http://www.hks.harvard.edu/presspol/publications/papers/working_papers/2007_01_carroll.pdf
Dorrah, J. (2008, December/January). Armies of one. American Journalism Review. Retrieved from http://www.ajr.org/Article.asp?id=4443
Franklin, Stephen (2002). Weighing the risks – staying alive. Columbia Journalism Review 41 (1): 24-25.
Garber, M. (2009, January 14). Johnny Jones 2.0. Columbia Journalism Review. Retrieved from http://www.cjr.org/behind_the_news/johnny_jones_20.php?page=all
Glaser, M. (2009, January). GlobalPost aims to resuscitate foreign correspondents online. Mediashift. Retrieved from http://www.pbs.org/mediashift/2009/01/globalpost-aims-to-resuscitate-foreign-correspondents-online008.html
Hamilton, J., & Jenner, E. (2004). Foreign correspondence: Evolution, not extinction. Neiman Reports. Fall. Retrieved from http://www.nieman.harvard.edu/reportsitem.aspx?id=100799
Hart, Kim (2005). Quitting Kabul. American Journalism Review 27 (1): 12-13.
Hargrove, Thomas and Guido H. Stempel III (2002). Exploring reader rnterest in international news. Newspaper Research Journal 23 (4): 46-51.
Layton, Charles (2000). It’s a small world. American Journalism Review June, p. 52.
Ludtke, M. (2009). Long-form multimedia journalism: Quality is the key ingredient. Nieman Reports. Spring. Retrieved from http://www.nieman.harvard.edu/reportsitem.aspx?id=100937
Parks, Michael (2002). Foreign News: What’s Next? Past Failures, Future Promises. Columbia Journalism Review January/February: 52.
Parks, Michael (2002). Weighing the risks – foreign coverage: The new math. Columbia Journalism Review 41 (1): 19.
Posetti, J. (2009, June). Rules of engagement for journalists on Twitter. Mediashift. Retrieved from http://www.pbs.org/mediashift/2009/06/rules-of-engagement-for-journalists-on-twitter170.html
Ricchiardi, S. (2008, December/January). Covering the world. American Journalism Review. Retrieved from http://www.ajr.org/Article.asp?id=4429
Shadid, Anthony (2002). Weighing the risks – I think I’m shot. Columbia Journalism Review 41 (1): 20-23.
Tai, Zixue and Tsan-Kuo Chang (2002). The global news and the pictures in their heads. Gazette: The International Journal for Communications Studies 64(3): 251-265.
Westphal, D. (2009, May). Foreign reporting, the entrepreneurial and multimedia way. Online Journalism Review. Retrieved from http://www.ojr.org/ojr/people/davidwestphal/200905/1724/
Woollacott, Martin (2005). Morrally engaged: Reporters in crises. Political Quarterly August Supplement 1, Vol. 76: 80-90.
Wu, H. Denis (2003). Homogeneity Around the world? Gazette: The International Journal for Communication Studies 65 (1): 9-24.
Saturday, October 31, 2009
International news case study: Glimpse
Glimpse is a nonprofit online platform for reporting about living abroad (Glimpse. n.d.). Its Web site, http://glimpse.org, hosts blogs and a travel/living abroad tips section, accepts story submissions, operates a photo contest, and serves as the vehicle for the work of participants in its Correspondents Program. Through the program, Glimpse selects 10 correspondents via an application process to work with Glimpse editors for regular posts to the site in exchange for a $600 stipend. Participants in the Correspondents Program must be between the ages of 18 and 34 and must live abroad for at least 10 weeks.
Glimpse was designed as a way for young people to share meaningful cultural experiences resulting from living abroad. “We’re a Web site geared toward Americans, with the idea that Americans could particularly benefit from a greater understanding of the world,” said Kerala Taylor, co-founder and editor-in-chief for Glimpse. “Glimpse started from this idea of having a platform to share daily life from abroad. We just felt like the study abroad experience was generally underappreciated,” Taylor said.
Though now it is supported in part by National Geographic, Glimpse started out in 1999 as a project initiated by then-undergraduate Brown University students Nick Fitzhugh and Taylor. Fitzhugh is now the publisher and senior designer. The idea was Fitzhugh’s, according to Taylor, who said he was struck by how wrong his preconceptions of life in Europe were when he spent a year in France and Italy before going to college (K. Taylor, personal communication, September 22, 2009). “His idea was that we would create a magazine. Back then print was kind of the first thing that people thought of. And online was more of a secondary component, and that was kind of how we envisioned it. We started a Web site first because it was cheaper.”
Their first magazine issue came out in spring of 2002, just before they graduated, and Glimpse continued to produce a quarterly print publication until fall of 2008, when they discontinued it to focus on the online component. Now the Correspondents Program is moving to the forefront for Glimpse, Taylor said. While serving as a platform for a variety of user-generated content was part of the idea behind Glimpse, they have found that readers’ expectations have changed, and they’re working to meet those expectations.
“We feel like these days people are becoming really jaded with user-generated content and the desire is for curated user-generated content,” Taylor said. “So people like to see their peers, nonprofessionals, being able to publish, but they also want to find good stuff, and they don’t want to be slogging through a million really boring blog entries to find that one good blog.”
Taylor said Glimpse has been getting around 500 applicants for the Correspondents Program at each application cycle, which makes the selection process competitive. They have also just opened up the program to non-U.S. citizens. “We’re looking into expanding the number that we work with, because we end up turning away people who are very qualified,” she said.
Glimpse tries to make the correspondents group about half undergraduate students and half people who have earned their bachelor’s degree. “People who have graduated are often doing different things abroad,” Taylor said. “They tend to go to less-traveled destinations, do volunteer work. We want to try to get a range of experiences.” In all cases, Glimpse tries to choose participants who will be interacting with the culture they’re living in while abroad, and getting out of their comfort zone, Taylor said.
Each participant in the Correspondents Program is assigned an editor who will work with them throughout the semester. The correspondents have a weekly check-in, they’re responsible for a weekly blog posting, photo submissions, one assignment story and one feature story, all of which they work closely with their editor to produce. “The story that they’re responsible for working on, we go through a minimum of three drafts, usually more five to seven, so it’s a pretty rigorous process,” Taylor said.
On the other hand, Taylor said, they know that the correspondents are abroad for other purposes, such as studying or volunteer projects, and they try to structure the program so it’s a manageable workload. The program targets English and journalism majors, but Taylor said anyone from any discipline who shows talent for writing or photography will be considered. Glimpse also tries to choose writers who have some photography skills and photographers who have some writing ability.
In addition to applying for the Correspondents Program, those going abroad can submit proposals for projects via the Web site, and if Glimpse likes the idea they’ll work with the applicant to get the project published.
Glimpse has had a relationship to National Geographic since 2002, Taylor said, when Fitzhugh e-mailed National Geographic’s CEO to tell him about the project, not really expecting to get a response. But the CEO wrote back and asked them to make a presentation to some senior-level staff at National Geographic. “It was a rather terrifying experience,” Taylor said. But it paid off. Glimpse received an initial planning grant from National Geographic.
That funding ran out quickly, though, Taylor said, and the two co-founders went on to work on Glimpse for about five years without paying themselves, doing bartending work on the side to stay afloat. By spring of 2007, the project reached the point where Glimpse was getting enough exposure that it needed to expand, but they couldn’t handle the workload and revenue was touch and go, Taylor said. “It was kind of that classic Catch-22 that small nonprofits are caught in so often,” she said.
So Glimpse went back to National Geographic to ask for additional support. That resulted in an invitation for Glimpse to move into the National Geographic offices in Washington, D.C., where they now have access to National Geographic’s resources and expertise. The editor-in-chief of National Geographic Traveler is the chair of Glimpse’s board of directors now, and Glimpse sometimes shares content with various divisions of National Geographic.
Glimpse’s staff consists of three people: Fitzhugh, Taylor and Managing Editor Anders Kelto. They are bolstered by “a very vibrant team of interns, who outnumber us,” Taylor said. “We love working with them because they are our demographic.”
Taylor said that while Glimpse often looks for ways to work more closely with National Geographic, they also think it’s probably in their best interests to remain independent. “National Geographic has some editorial standards that could be restrictive for us just given our demographic. But they also have a very large interest in our demographic,” she said, noting that the venerable publisher is eager to tap into a younger market. National Geographic also sees Glimpse as a potential talent feed, Taylor said. “We’ve worked with about 40 correspondents now, and a couple of them I can really see becoming National Geographic photographers,” she said. “I cannot at all guarantee that, but it is a foot in the door.”
Glimpse is also open to sharing content with other media outlets, Taylor said. “A lot of these publications feel like they’re losing the younger generation and they don’t know how to appeal to them. We offer something there, I think.”
Glimpse was designed as a way for young people to share meaningful cultural experiences resulting from living abroad. “We’re a Web site geared toward Americans, with the idea that Americans could particularly benefit from a greater understanding of the world,” said Kerala Taylor, co-founder and editor-in-chief for Glimpse. “Glimpse started from this idea of having a platform to share daily life from abroad. We just felt like the study abroad experience was generally underappreciated,” Taylor said.
Though now it is supported in part by National Geographic, Glimpse started out in 1999 as a project initiated by then-undergraduate Brown University students Nick Fitzhugh and Taylor. Fitzhugh is now the publisher and senior designer. The idea was Fitzhugh’s, according to Taylor, who said he was struck by how wrong his preconceptions of life in Europe were when he spent a year in France and Italy before going to college (K. Taylor, personal communication, September 22, 2009). “His idea was that we would create a magazine. Back then print was kind of the first thing that people thought of. And online was more of a secondary component, and that was kind of how we envisioned it. We started a Web site first because it was cheaper.”
Their first magazine issue came out in spring of 2002, just before they graduated, and Glimpse continued to produce a quarterly print publication until fall of 2008, when they discontinued it to focus on the online component. Now the Correspondents Program is moving to the forefront for Glimpse, Taylor said. While serving as a platform for a variety of user-generated content was part of the idea behind Glimpse, they have found that readers’ expectations have changed, and they’re working to meet those expectations.
“We feel like these days people are becoming really jaded with user-generated content and the desire is for curated user-generated content,” Taylor said. “So people like to see their peers, nonprofessionals, being able to publish, but they also want to find good stuff, and they don’t want to be slogging through a million really boring blog entries to find that one good blog.”
Taylor said Glimpse has been getting around 500 applicants for the Correspondents Program at each application cycle, which makes the selection process competitive. They have also just opened up the program to non-U.S. citizens. “We’re looking into expanding the number that we work with, because we end up turning away people who are very qualified,” she said.
Glimpse tries to make the correspondents group about half undergraduate students and half people who have earned their bachelor’s degree. “People who have graduated are often doing different things abroad,” Taylor said. “They tend to go to less-traveled destinations, do volunteer work. We want to try to get a range of experiences.” In all cases, Glimpse tries to choose participants who will be interacting with the culture they’re living in while abroad, and getting out of their comfort zone, Taylor said.
Each participant in the Correspondents Program is assigned an editor who will work with them throughout the semester. The correspondents have a weekly check-in, they’re responsible for a weekly blog posting, photo submissions, one assignment story and one feature story, all of which they work closely with their editor to produce. “The story that they’re responsible for working on, we go through a minimum of three drafts, usually more five to seven, so it’s a pretty rigorous process,” Taylor said.
On the other hand, Taylor said, they know that the correspondents are abroad for other purposes, such as studying or volunteer projects, and they try to structure the program so it’s a manageable workload. The program targets English and journalism majors, but Taylor said anyone from any discipline who shows talent for writing or photography will be considered. Glimpse also tries to choose writers who have some photography skills and photographers who have some writing ability.
In addition to applying for the Correspondents Program, those going abroad can submit proposals for projects via the Web site, and if Glimpse likes the idea they’ll work with the applicant to get the project published.
Glimpse has had a relationship to National Geographic since 2002, Taylor said, when Fitzhugh e-mailed National Geographic’s CEO to tell him about the project, not really expecting to get a response. But the CEO wrote back and asked them to make a presentation to some senior-level staff at National Geographic. “It was a rather terrifying experience,” Taylor said. But it paid off. Glimpse received an initial planning grant from National Geographic.
That funding ran out quickly, though, Taylor said, and the two co-founders went on to work on Glimpse for about five years without paying themselves, doing bartending work on the side to stay afloat. By spring of 2007, the project reached the point where Glimpse was getting enough exposure that it needed to expand, but they couldn’t handle the workload and revenue was touch and go, Taylor said. “It was kind of that classic Catch-22 that small nonprofits are caught in so often,” she said.
So Glimpse went back to National Geographic to ask for additional support. That resulted in an invitation for Glimpse to move into the National Geographic offices in Washington, D.C., where they now have access to National Geographic’s resources and expertise. The editor-in-chief of National Geographic Traveler is the chair of Glimpse’s board of directors now, and Glimpse sometimes shares content with various divisions of National Geographic.
Glimpse’s staff consists of three people: Fitzhugh, Taylor and Managing Editor Anders Kelto. They are bolstered by “a very vibrant team of interns, who outnumber us,” Taylor said. “We love working with them because they are our demographic.”
Taylor said that while Glimpse often looks for ways to work more closely with National Geographic, they also think it’s probably in their best interests to remain independent. “National Geographic has some editorial standards that could be restrictive for us just given our demographic. But they also have a very large interest in our demographic,” she said, noting that the venerable publisher is eager to tap into a younger market. National Geographic also sees Glimpse as a potential talent feed, Taylor said. “We’ve worked with about 40 correspondents now, and a couple of them I can really see becoming National Geographic photographers,” she said. “I cannot at all guarantee that, but it is a foot in the door.”
Glimpse is also open to sharing content with other media outlets, Taylor said. “A lot of these publications feel like they’re losing the younger generation and they don’t know how to appeal to them. We offer something there, I think.”
International news case study: International Reporting Project
The International Reporting Project (IRP) has been around for a while, having been launched in 1998 to help U.S. journalists report on underreported stories overseas. It describes itself as a pioneer of the type of nonprofit journalism that seeks to counterbalance the decline in international news coverage in much of the mainstream media. But the changes in the news industry are bringing about some changes in the approach of the IRP.
“We started off very much trying to provide opportunities for early career journalists who had not had chances to do international work and were interested in doing foreign coverage and then making a career of it,” said John Schidlovsky, former foreign correspondent and founding director of the IRP (J. Schidlovsky, personal communication, September 22, 2009).
The program was designed to train the next generation of foreign correspondents, Schidlovsky said, and at the time he started the IRP, U.S. news outlets still had many foreign bureaus, the expected destinations for many of the journalists who participated. The IRP fellows, chosen through a competitive selection process, spent six weeks with the IRP in Washington, D.C., at The Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS) of The Johns Hopkins University, preparing for their international project. They then spent five weeks conducting their reporting abroad, followed by two weeks back in D.C.
“Well now, of course, so many of those bureaus have closed and those jobs no longer exist,” Schidlovsky said. “So we began refining our program to accommodate the new realities.”
IRP has expanded the pool of applicants for its fellowship program, encouraging experienced, well-established journalists to apply alongside colleagues early in their careers. “It’s not a matter of grooming rising stars and giving opportunities to early career journalists, although we still like to do that because they deserve opportunities,” Schidlovsky said. “Right now we see ourselves as stepping into the void of foreign coverage by providing stories no matter who they are by, the emphasis much more on the quality of the story no matter who does it.” Applicants have to have at least three years of professional journalistic experience, however.
The program has also shortened the time commitment for fellows, dropping it to two weeks in D.C. before the going overseas, five weeks working overseas on the project, and two weeks in D.C. upon returning from their reporting. Journalists like the shortened timeframe, especially compared to typical academic fellowships, according to Schidlovsky. “People can’t afford to do that anymore. They don’t want to leave their news organizations for that long because their job may disappear, or they feel like they’re out of sync with the business,” he said.
Fellows receive a free round-trip air ticket to their destination plus a $4,500 stipend for the expenses of their overseas reporting, plus a $1,500 stipend and hotel accommodations for the two weeks in D.C. before leaving for their project for fellows not living in the D.C. area, and another $1,500 stipend and hotel accommodations for the two weeks back in D.C. after the reporting project is completed, also to cover expenses for non-D.C. residents. Fellows can be employed by a media organization, or they can be independent journalists. A fellow’s employer may use the work generated by their employee during the fellowship; freelancers may determine how their reporting will be used, and IRP staff make themselves available to help get projects published. Excerpts from the projects also get posted on the IRP Web site, as do blog entries from the fellows while they’re overseas.
Schidlovsky said IRP helped start the movement whereby organizations are taking a nonprofit approach to producing quality journalism, using grants and foundation funding to create stories that otherwise would not get done, as ProPublica is doing with investigative reporting. “I think we sort of started it 12 years ago, perhaps not even being fully conscious of what we were beginning, but it’s clearly morphed into that kind of a program now, where we are actually creating more foreign coverage each year through our own efforts than The Boston Globe, The Baltimore Sun, The Miami Herald combined,” Schidlovsky said. “We never sort of dreamed that would be possible, but that’s the new reality of the business.”
IRP fellows have included journalists working in every medium of the news industry, including multimedia journalists. It also operates what it calls “Gatekeeper Trips,” group tours of under-covered but newsworthy countries for editors at news organizations who make decisions about which news items will be published or broadcast.
There were nearly 200 applicants for the program this year, which makes IRP the most applied-for journalism fellowship program based at a university in the United States, Schidlovsky said. Nonetheless, the demand for the program is growing, and Schidlovsky would like to be able to extend fellowships to more journalists. “We could easily have sent out 80 to 90 tremendously talented journalists to do stories if we had the funding,” he said of this year’s applicants. “The need is there; the demand is there; all that’s missing to grow the program is more money.”
“We started off very much trying to provide opportunities for early career journalists who had not had chances to do international work and were interested in doing foreign coverage and then making a career of it,” said John Schidlovsky, former foreign correspondent and founding director of the IRP (J. Schidlovsky, personal communication, September 22, 2009).
The program was designed to train the next generation of foreign correspondents, Schidlovsky said, and at the time he started the IRP, U.S. news outlets still had many foreign bureaus, the expected destinations for many of the journalists who participated. The IRP fellows, chosen through a competitive selection process, spent six weeks with the IRP in Washington, D.C., at The Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS) of The Johns Hopkins University, preparing for their international project. They then spent five weeks conducting their reporting abroad, followed by two weeks back in D.C.
“Well now, of course, so many of those bureaus have closed and those jobs no longer exist,” Schidlovsky said. “So we began refining our program to accommodate the new realities.”
IRP has expanded the pool of applicants for its fellowship program, encouraging experienced, well-established journalists to apply alongside colleagues early in their careers. “It’s not a matter of grooming rising stars and giving opportunities to early career journalists, although we still like to do that because they deserve opportunities,” Schidlovsky said. “Right now we see ourselves as stepping into the void of foreign coverage by providing stories no matter who they are by, the emphasis much more on the quality of the story no matter who does it.” Applicants have to have at least three years of professional journalistic experience, however.
The program has also shortened the time commitment for fellows, dropping it to two weeks in D.C. before the going overseas, five weeks working overseas on the project, and two weeks in D.C. upon returning from their reporting. Journalists like the shortened timeframe, especially compared to typical academic fellowships, according to Schidlovsky. “People can’t afford to do that anymore. They don’t want to leave their news organizations for that long because their job may disappear, or they feel like they’re out of sync with the business,” he said.
Fellows receive a free round-trip air ticket to their destination plus a $4,500 stipend for the expenses of their overseas reporting, plus a $1,500 stipend and hotel accommodations for the two weeks in D.C. before leaving for their project for fellows not living in the D.C. area, and another $1,500 stipend and hotel accommodations for the two weeks back in D.C. after the reporting project is completed, also to cover expenses for non-D.C. residents. Fellows can be employed by a media organization, or they can be independent journalists. A fellow’s employer may use the work generated by their employee during the fellowship; freelancers may determine how their reporting will be used, and IRP staff make themselves available to help get projects published. Excerpts from the projects also get posted on the IRP Web site, as do blog entries from the fellows while they’re overseas.
Schidlovsky said IRP helped start the movement whereby organizations are taking a nonprofit approach to producing quality journalism, using grants and foundation funding to create stories that otherwise would not get done, as ProPublica is doing with investigative reporting. “I think we sort of started it 12 years ago, perhaps not even being fully conscious of what we were beginning, but it’s clearly morphed into that kind of a program now, where we are actually creating more foreign coverage each year through our own efforts than The Boston Globe, The Baltimore Sun, The Miami Herald combined,” Schidlovsky said. “We never sort of dreamed that would be possible, but that’s the new reality of the business.”
IRP fellows have included journalists working in every medium of the news industry, including multimedia journalists. It also operates what it calls “Gatekeeper Trips,” group tours of under-covered but newsworthy countries for editors at news organizations who make decisions about which news items will be published or broadcast.
There were nearly 200 applicants for the program this year, which makes IRP the most applied-for journalism fellowship program based at a university in the United States, Schidlovsky said. Nonetheless, the demand for the program is growing, and Schidlovsky would like to be able to extend fellowships to more journalists. “We could easily have sent out 80 to 90 tremendously talented journalists to do stories if we had the funding,” he said of this year’s applicants. “The need is there; the demand is there; all that’s missing to grow the program is more money.”
International news case study: Common Language Project
Another nonprofit model serving up international reporting is The Common Language Project, which bills itself as a multimedia production house that provides news “about the people affected by key social justice issues, with a specific focus on stigmatized regions and peoples underrepresented in the traditional media” (Common Language Project, n.d.).
Common Language’s small core reporting team, consisting of its three founding members Sarah Stuteville, Alex Stonehill and Jessica Partnow, seeks projects that deal with topics such as human rights, gender equality, social and economic justice, immigration, education and environmental issues. They produce written articles, blogs and video and radio pieces, post them on their Web site (www.commonlanguageproject.net) and sell the use of their works to for-profit media, and, on a sliding rate scale, to nonprofit media.
Common Language was launched in 2006, after Stuteville, Stonehill and Partnow graduated from college and faced a daunting job market. “We were all interested in pursuing careers in journalism, but 2006 was I think probably the year of crisis for the newspaper industry for sure, and kind of the moment when everybody recognized that the jobs were disappearing in journalism and things were going to be changing in some pretty profound ways,” said Sarah Stuteville in a recent interview (S. Stuteville, personal communication, October 5, 2009). Many of the professors in media studies at Hunter College, where Stuteville earned her degree, weren’t sure how to advise students given the market circumstances, she said. Then one of her professors suggested that the best plan might be to just make up the job she wanted, and that suggestion was in part the impetus for Common Language. “It was like, OK, in an ideal world, what sort of job would we want to have and how can we go about trying to make it and see if there’s support out there for it?”
The team saved up money and decided to go out and report from as many places as possible that were in their view either under-reported or reported in a mainly one-dimensional way. That first venture lasted eight months, and took the team to Southeast Asia, Central Asia and the Middle East. They weren’t initially set on producing multimedia work, Stuteville said, but they realized along the way that because they were going to chiefly publish online, they needed to do more than just stories and photos. So they taught themselves how to get audio and video as part of their reporting, and began blogging immediately, she said.
The operation has steadily grown from that time, said Stuteville, using a kind of a hybrid funding model. A recent agreement with the University of Washington secured some operational funding as well as offices and some other resources. In exchange, the Common Language team is teaching some classes, running workshops and operating an internship program. Stuteville said the Common Language team hopes the relationship with the university might evolve, and they’re testing a theory that one way new media projects could incubate and get the support they need is through partnerships with universities.
Common Language also gets funding from a couple of foundations, and earns income from speaking engagements at schools and universities. But most of the project’s income comes from project-specific clients for their international projects as well as local investigative work the team conducts in the Seattle area. Individual contributors and a couple of annual fundraisers provide support as well.
So far, however, the Common Language team members still have to work other part-time jobs to make ends meet. Nonetheless, the team has been able to produce multi-part multimedia reporting packages from East Africa and Pakistan, both with support from the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting, and they’ve had their work picked up by the likes of PBS's Foreign Exchange with Daljit Dhaliwal, the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, PRI’s The World, NPR’s Morning Edition, BBC Wildlife Magazine, Frontline/World and the San Francisco Chronicle.
They also post the work of other multimedia journalists reporting from abroad and working on local investigative projects, and though they cannot fund projects by other journalists, Common Language does accept proposals for collaborative projects, for which Common Language can provide support services such as assistance in obtaining funding and in placing projects with media outlets. The group has also been collaborating with a group of filmmakers in the Seattle area, and worked on a documentary last year on the closing of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer.
Collaborations are key to Common Language, Stuteville said, and she thinks that’s one direction the news industry is heading. “I feel pretty confident about the way multimedia journalism might work in coming years and generations. I think it’s going to more and more be about collaboration and resource sharing in the sense that you may focus on some specific part of media making or journalism, but you’re constantly working in collaboration with other people to find money, support and to have the expertise to create work.”
Stuteville said each member of Common Language works about 40 hours per week on Common Language projects, in addition to the hours they put into their part-time jobs. They have a collective annual goal of cutting one day of non-Common Language work per week so they can eventually drop the outside jobs. They also are committed to being involved in at least one international project a year, though they would like to do more someday. All of this, and the newly acquired teaching duties, add up to a lot of work for a small staff.
“Trying to figure out how to make a career in the field right now, it just requires that you really, really, really like the work that you do, because there’s very little security in it right now, and even less money,” said Stuteville.
“You have to actually like the nonprofit bureaucracy side as much as you like the reporting side, as much as you like the editing side, as much as you like the collaboration side. And I really do, even though it’s a lot of work, a lot of hours in the week, it’s definitely worth it to me.”
Common Language’s small core reporting team, consisting of its three founding members Sarah Stuteville, Alex Stonehill and Jessica Partnow, seeks projects that deal with topics such as human rights, gender equality, social and economic justice, immigration, education and environmental issues. They produce written articles, blogs and video and radio pieces, post them on their Web site (www.commonlanguageproject.net) and sell the use of their works to for-profit media, and, on a sliding rate scale, to nonprofit media.
Common Language was launched in 2006, after Stuteville, Stonehill and Partnow graduated from college and faced a daunting job market. “We were all interested in pursuing careers in journalism, but 2006 was I think probably the year of crisis for the newspaper industry for sure, and kind of the moment when everybody recognized that the jobs were disappearing in journalism and things were going to be changing in some pretty profound ways,” said Sarah Stuteville in a recent interview (S. Stuteville, personal communication, October 5, 2009). Many of the professors in media studies at Hunter College, where Stuteville earned her degree, weren’t sure how to advise students given the market circumstances, she said. Then one of her professors suggested that the best plan might be to just make up the job she wanted, and that suggestion was in part the impetus for Common Language. “It was like, OK, in an ideal world, what sort of job would we want to have and how can we go about trying to make it and see if there’s support out there for it?”
The team saved up money and decided to go out and report from as many places as possible that were in their view either under-reported or reported in a mainly one-dimensional way. That first venture lasted eight months, and took the team to Southeast Asia, Central Asia and the Middle East. They weren’t initially set on producing multimedia work, Stuteville said, but they realized along the way that because they were going to chiefly publish online, they needed to do more than just stories and photos. So they taught themselves how to get audio and video as part of their reporting, and began blogging immediately, she said.
The operation has steadily grown from that time, said Stuteville, using a kind of a hybrid funding model. A recent agreement with the University of Washington secured some operational funding as well as offices and some other resources. In exchange, the Common Language team is teaching some classes, running workshops and operating an internship program. Stuteville said the Common Language team hopes the relationship with the university might evolve, and they’re testing a theory that one way new media projects could incubate and get the support they need is through partnerships with universities.
Common Language also gets funding from a couple of foundations, and earns income from speaking engagements at schools and universities. But most of the project’s income comes from project-specific clients for their international projects as well as local investigative work the team conducts in the Seattle area. Individual contributors and a couple of annual fundraisers provide support as well.
So far, however, the Common Language team members still have to work other part-time jobs to make ends meet. Nonetheless, the team has been able to produce multi-part multimedia reporting packages from East Africa and Pakistan, both with support from the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting, and they’ve had their work picked up by the likes of PBS's Foreign Exchange with Daljit Dhaliwal, the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, PRI’s The World, NPR’s Morning Edition, BBC Wildlife Magazine, Frontline/World and the San Francisco Chronicle.
They also post the work of other multimedia journalists reporting from abroad and working on local investigative projects, and though they cannot fund projects by other journalists, Common Language does accept proposals for collaborative projects, for which Common Language can provide support services such as assistance in obtaining funding and in placing projects with media outlets. The group has also been collaborating with a group of filmmakers in the Seattle area, and worked on a documentary last year on the closing of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer.
Collaborations are key to Common Language, Stuteville said, and she thinks that’s one direction the news industry is heading. “I feel pretty confident about the way multimedia journalism might work in coming years and generations. I think it’s going to more and more be about collaboration and resource sharing in the sense that you may focus on some specific part of media making or journalism, but you’re constantly working in collaboration with other people to find money, support and to have the expertise to create work.”
Stuteville said each member of Common Language works about 40 hours per week on Common Language projects, in addition to the hours they put into their part-time jobs. They have a collective annual goal of cutting one day of non-Common Language work per week so they can eventually drop the outside jobs. They also are committed to being involved in at least one international project a year, though they would like to do more someday. All of this, and the newly acquired teaching duties, add up to a lot of work for a small staff.
“Trying to figure out how to make a career in the field right now, it just requires that you really, really, really like the work that you do, because there’s very little security in it right now, and even less money,” said Stuteville.
“You have to actually like the nonprofit bureaucracy side as much as you like the reporting side, as much as you like the editing side, as much as you like the collaboration side. And I really do, even though it’s a lot of work, a lot of hours in the week, it’s definitely worth it to me.”
International news case study: Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting
An organization that works with GlobalPost, the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting also focuses on international reporting and “under-reported topics,” according to its Web site — http://www.pulitzercenter.org/ (Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting, n.d.).
It was established in 2006, and has been described as a leading proponent of the journalist as entrepreneur (Westphal, 2009). What that means, in part, is that being a grantee of the Pulitzer Center doesn’t mean you’re in the money; the center only covers travel expenses for its reporters. On the other hand, it works with its reporters to find quality outlets for their work and put the spotlight on their reporting. It solicits international reporting projects that cover under-reported issues and tell the stories through the use of multiple platforms.
Associate Director Nathalie Applewhite said that the center receives about 20 proposals per month, a number that has remained fairly steady since the organization’s launch (N. Applewhite, personal communication, October 20, 2009). What has changed, though, is the quality of the proposals.
I think when we started out we just weren’t on people’s radars much, and also experienced journalists had opportunities and they could still get their stories funded, whereas the younger freelancers couldn’t so they needed our help more so than the Pulitzer Prize winners. But I think since we started the organization we’ve certainly seen an increase in very high quality proposals from journalists who you would think people would be throwing money at to do their stories, and so that is making it harder for the younger journalists. (N. Applewhite, personal communication, October 20, 2009)
For 2009, the center expects to fund a total of 51 projects, Applewhite said, a number that is determined strictly by the amount of funding available. Qualities the center looks for in proposals include compelling stories; smart, tight budgets; a strong track record in the field for the journalist(s) included; and a solid distribution plan for the end product with demonstrable interest from editors or producers at U.S. media outlets. The Web site also stipulates that the target media outlets be “wide-reaching,” meaning they have audiences of 50,000 or more. Having an education outreach component to the proposal also could help its chances.
Most accepted proposals earn funding of $2,000 to $10,000, according to the center’s Web site, but funding could go as high as $20,000 for a project depending on its needs. Reporting supported by the center has been featured in outlets such as The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Economist, The Christian Science Monitor, GlobalPost, NPR, PBS and Smithsonian Magazine.
Applewhite said that although there have been instances where it was a struggle to get a strong story placed, the center finds many media outlets are eager for the content produced by Pulitzer Center journalists. “I think a lot of the outlets just because of their own financial constraints are really happy to have something that’s been vetted, that this isn’t just some random person or a think tank sending them stories that they want,” she said.
Young journalists with little experience might not prove too competitive in seeking project funding from the center, but they might get a leg up through the center’s Campus Consortium program. Through that initiative, the center works with a consortium of universities, which provide $10,000 each to fund the program. The center, in turn, provides two campus visits per year by Pulitzer Center journalists, funds up to $2,000 for one student’s reporting project at each of the participating universities, and offers the student support and mentoring from the Pulitzer Center staff.
The center is an independent division of the think tank the World Security Institute, with a separate funding stream provided by primary donors Emily Rauh Pulitzer, the Emily Rauh Pulitzer Foundation, David Moore, and the David and Katherine Moore Family Foundation. It also has received funding from the MAC AIDS Fund for a series of HIV/AIDS in the Caribbean; from the Stanley Foundation and the Carnegie Corporation of New York for work on fragile states and states at risk; and from the Educational Foundation of America and the McCormick Foundation for the center’s educational activities.
Those educational activities include its Global Gateway, an online offering for teachers and students that uses center-supported reporting projects as part of issue-based lesson plans for classrooms, bringing journalists to classrooms to discuss their experiences, and facilitating online question-and-answer sessions on the issue, and in some cases linking students in the United States with students in the country where the reporting originated.
“We realized it wasn’t enough to be funding the reporting itself and that the bigger problem here, to break it into economic terms, was both supply and demand,” Applewhite said of the origins of Global Gateway. “If we wanted to see more quality reporting in the world in the years ahead we had to make sure that our youth were growing up with a curiosity about the rest of the world.” Many of the center’s reporting projects lend themselves to classrooms particularly because most have at least some short video component that works well as an introduction to the topic.
That video component is part of the center’s preference for multimedia reporting projects that combine print, photography, video and audio elements. The center encourages journalists to work in teams on the projects in order to achieve a quality product in each medium, Applewhite said.
The Center also partners with YouTube, with funding from Sony VAIO and Intel, to offer an annual video reporting contest, Project: Report. The contest is designed for nonprofessional journalists who produce reports of five minutes or less that “tell stories that might not otherwise be told,” according to the contest Web site, http://www.youtube.com/user/projectreport. The site also offers tips on video reporting.
Works Cited
Westphal, D. (2009, May). Foreign reporting, the entrepreneurial and multimedia way. Online Journalism Review. Retrieved from http://www.ojr.org/ojr/people/davidwestphal/200905/1724/
It was established in 2006, and has been described as a leading proponent of the journalist as entrepreneur (Westphal, 2009). What that means, in part, is that being a grantee of the Pulitzer Center doesn’t mean you’re in the money; the center only covers travel expenses for its reporters. On the other hand, it works with its reporters to find quality outlets for their work and put the spotlight on their reporting. It solicits international reporting projects that cover under-reported issues and tell the stories through the use of multiple platforms.
Associate Director Nathalie Applewhite said that the center receives about 20 proposals per month, a number that has remained fairly steady since the organization’s launch (N. Applewhite, personal communication, October 20, 2009). What has changed, though, is the quality of the proposals.
I think when we started out we just weren’t on people’s radars much, and also experienced journalists had opportunities and they could still get their stories funded, whereas the younger freelancers couldn’t so they needed our help more so than the Pulitzer Prize winners. But I think since we started the organization we’ve certainly seen an increase in very high quality proposals from journalists who you would think people would be throwing money at to do their stories, and so that is making it harder for the younger journalists. (N. Applewhite, personal communication, October 20, 2009)
For 2009, the center expects to fund a total of 51 projects, Applewhite said, a number that is determined strictly by the amount of funding available. Qualities the center looks for in proposals include compelling stories; smart, tight budgets; a strong track record in the field for the journalist(s) included; and a solid distribution plan for the end product with demonstrable interest from editors or producers at U.S. media outlets. The Web site also stipulates that the target media outlets be “wide-reaching,” meaning they have audiences of 50,000 or more. Having an education outreach component to the proposal also could help its chances.
Most accepted proposals earn funding of $2,000 to $10,000, according to the center’s Web site, but funding could go as high as $20,000 for a project depending on its needs. Reporting supported by the center has been featured in outlets such as The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Economist, The Christian Science Monitor, GlobalPost, NPR, PBS and Smithsonian Magazine.
Applewhite said that although there have been instances where it was a struggle to get a strong story placed, the center finds many media outlets are eager for the content produced by Pulitzer Center journalists. “I think a lot of the outlets just because of their own financial constraints are really happy to have something that’s been vetted, that this isn’t just some random person or a think tank sending them stories that they want,” she said.
Young journalists with little experience might not prove too competitive in seeking project funding from the center, but they might get a leg up through the center’s Campus Consortium program. Through that initiative, the center works with a consortium of universities, which provide $10,000 each to fund the program. The center, in turn, provides two campus visits per year by Pulitzer Center journalists, funds up to $2,000 for one student’s reporting project at each of the participating universities, and offers the student support and mentoring from the Pulitzer Center staff.
The center is an independent division of the think tank the World Security Institute, with a separate funding stream provided by primary donors Emily Rauh Pulitzer, the Emily Rauh Pulitzer Foundation, David Moore, and the David and Katherine Moore Family Foundation. It also has received funding from the MAC AIDS Fund for a series of HIV/AIDS in the Caribbean; from the Stanley Foundation and the Carnegie Corporation of New York for work on fragile states and states at risk; and from the Educational Foundation of America and the McCormick Foundation for the center’s educational activities.
Those educational activities include its Global Gateway, an online offering for teachers and students that uses center-supported reporting projects as part of issue-based lesson plans for classrooms, bringing journalists to classrooms to discuss their experiences, and facilitating online question-and-answer sessions on the issue, and in some cases linking students in the United States with students in the country where the reporting originated.
“We realized it wasn’t enough to be funding the reporting itself and that the bigger problem here, to break it into economic terms, was both supply and demand,” Applewhite said of the origins of Global Gateway. “If we wanted to see more quality reporting in the world in the years ahead we had to make sure that our youth were growing up with a curiosity about the rest of the world.” Many of the center’s reporting projects lend themselves to classrooms particularly because most have at least some short video component that works well as an introduction to the topic.
That video component is part of the center’s preference for multimedia reporting projects that combine print, photography, video and audio elements. The center encourages journalists to work in teams on the projects in order to achieve a quality product in each medium, Applewhite said.
The Center also partners with YouTube, with funding from Sony VAIO and Intel, to offer an annual video reporting contest, Project: Report. The contest is designed for nonprofessional journalists who produce reports of five minutes or less that “tell stories that might not otherwise be told,” according to the contest Web site, http://www.youtube.com/user/projectreport. The site also offers tips on video reporting.
Works Cited
Westphal, D. (2009, May). Foreign reporting, the entrepreneurial and multimedia way. Online Journalism Review. Retrieved from http://www.ojr.org/ojr/people/davidwestphal/200905/1724/
International news case study: GlobalPost
One of the highest profile operations among new international news models is GlobalPost, which opened up its online shop to some fanfare in January 2009. The operation is dedicated to providing news of the world via a team of correspondents who are paid a monthly stipend and stock in GlobalPost.
Its stories are viewable free of charge at its Web site, http://www.globalpost.com/, with earnings expected to come from syndication to other news outlets, advertising, and memberships that provide access to premium content. GlobalPost also offers the services of correspondents for hire for journalism projects. In some cases it is also partnering with other organizations, like the Christian Science Monitor, to cover the cost of a correspondent.
All of GlobalPost’s correspondents are living in the countries they cover, and as part of a January 2009 interview broadcast by the radio program “On the Media,” Bob Garfield reported that GlobalPost’s correspondents were reporting from 65 countries at that time (Garfield, January 2009). In addition to the correspondents GlobalPost has on stipend, it also solicits contributions from guest correspondents, providing one possible opportunity for emerging correspondents.
According to a mid-year message from GlobalPost President Philip Balboni posted to their Web site, GlobalPost had made 20 syndication agreements at that point, including deals with the New York Daily News, the Newark Star Ledger, the South China Morning Post, thehuffingtonpost.com and Reuters.com (Balboni, July 4, 2009). But a more recent development, the announcement in September of a partnership with CBS News, may be the best indication to date of industry respect and sustainability for GlobalPost’s model. “Having a broadcast network partner was a high priority for us, and to be associated with CBS News is a great validation of what we are trying to build,” Balboni told The New York Times (Carr, September 27, 2009). The deal brings monthly payments to GlobalPost in exchange for its journalists providing information that CBS will use as a basis for some of its reporting.
According to Balboni’s July message, GlobalPost had published 3,000 articles, videos and photo galleries since their January start. Balboni also reported that GlobalPost had received 2.6 million visits to its Web site from more than 1.1 million people in 223 countries and territories.
At the time of its launch, GlobalPost had 14 U.S.-based staff working on the editing and production of multimedia elements of its correspondent projects (Garber, January 14, 2009).
Founders Balboni and Charles Sennott are both experienced journalists. Balboni is also the founder and former president of New England Cable News. Sennott, who serves as executive editor and vice president of GlobalPost, is a former foreign correspondent and bureau chief for The Boston Globe who has also worked extensively in multimedia and as an on-air news analyst, according to his biography on the Global Post Web site.
Balboni told the Columbia Journalism Review for a January article on the launch of GlobalPost that international reporting must have for-profit models (Garber, January 14, 2009). “The best way to ensure long-term sustainability is by having a real business that is fired in the marketplace, and that has revenue that’s generated by consumers and other means that will sustain it for the long term,” he said.
Works Cited
Balboni, P. (2009, July 4). Message from president and co-founder Philip Balboni. GlobalPost. Retrieved from http://www.globalpost.com/about-us
Carr, D. (2009, September 27). To cover world, CBS joins with a news site. The New York Times. Retrieved from http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/28/business/media/28cbs.html?_r=3&adxnnl=1&ref=business&adxnnlx=1254143866-YBgnd9IbsMw0WRsyIANVRg
Garber, M. (2009, January 14). Johnny Jones 2.0. Columbia Journalism Review. Retrieved from http://www.cjr.org/behind_the_news/johnny_jones_20.php?page=all
Garfield, B. (2009, January). We are the world. Transcript of an interview broadcast on the radio program On the Media. Retrieved from http://www.onthemedia.org/transcripts/2009/01/16/05
Its stories are viewable free of charge at its Web site, http://www.globalpost.com/, with earnings expected to come from syndication to other news outlets, advertising, and memberships that provide access to premium content. GlobalPost also offers the services of correspondents for hire for journalism projects. In some cases it is also partnering with other organizations, like the Christian Science Monitor, to cover the cost of a correspondent.
All of GlobalPost’s correspondents are living in the countries they cover, and as part of a January 2009 interview broadcast by the radio program “On the Media,” Bob Garfield reported that GlobalPost’s correspondents were reporting from 65 countries at that time (Garfield, January 2009). In addition to the correspondents GlobalPost has on stipend, it also solicits contributions from guest correspondents, providing one possible opportunity for emerging correspondents.
According to a mid-year message from GlobalPost President Philip Balboni posted to their Web site, GlobalPost had made 20 syndication agreements at that point, including deals with the New York Daily News, the Newark Star Ledger, the South China Morning Post, thehuffingtonpost.com and Reuters.com (Balboni, July 4, 2009). But a more recent development, the announcement in September of a partnership with CBS News, may be the best indication to date of industry respect and sustainability for GlobalPost’s model. “Having a broadcast network partner was a high priority for us, and to be associated with CBS News is a great validation of what we are trying to build,” Balboni told The New York Times (Carr, September 27, 2009). The deal brings monthly payments to GlobalPost in exchange for its journalists providing information that CBS will use as a basis for some of its reporting.
According to Balboni’s July message, GlobalPost had published 3,000 articles, videos and photo galleries since their January start. Balboni also reported that GlobalPost had received 2.6 million visits to its Web site from more than 1.1 million people in 223 countries and territories.
At the time of its launch, GlobalPost had 14 U.S.-based staff working on the editing and production of multimedia elements of its correspondent projects (Garber, January 14, 2009).
Founders Balboni and Charles Sennott are both experienced journalists. Balboni is also the founder and former president of New England Cable News. Sennott, who serves as executive editor and vice president of GlobalPost, is a former foreign correspondent and bureau chief for The Boston Globe who has also worked extensively in multimedia and as an on-air news analyst, according to his biography on the Global Post Web site.
Balboni told the Columbia Journalism Review for a January article on the launch of GlobalPost that international reporting must have for-profit models (Garber, January 14, 2009). “The best way to ensure long-term sustainability is by having a real business that is fired in the marketplace, and that has revenue that’s generated by consumers and other means that will sustain it for the long term,” he said.
Works Cited
Balboni, P. (2009, July 4). Message from president and co-founder Philip Balboni. GlobalPost. Retrieved from http://www.globalpost.com/about-us
Carr, D. (2009, September 27). To cover world, CBS joins with a news site. The New York Times. Retrieved from http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/28/business/media/28cbs.html?_r=3&adxnnl=1&ref=business&adxnnlx=1254143866-YBgnd9IbsMw0WRsyIANVRg
Garber, M. (2009, January 14). Johnny Jones 2.0. Columbia Journalism Review. Retrieved from http://www.cjr.org/behind_the_news/johnny_jones_20.php?page=all
Garfield, B. (2009, January). We are the world. Transcript of an interview broadcast on the radio program On the Media. Retrieved from http://www.onthemedia.org/transcripts/2009/01/16/05
Pitching, making a living and other tips
In his Tweets on his foreign correspondence experience, Dan Baum includes very specific recommendations on pitching stories (Baum, 2009). He suggests calling the switchboard at the target outlet, asking for the top editor’s assistant, telling that person that you’re planning to move the destination country and asking which editor would be most interested in news from there, then ask for that editor’s assistant. Next, find out the spelling of the editor’s name, the best day of the week and time of day to email, and the preferred length of the pitch.
Journalist Deborah Bonello advises newcomers to foreign correspondence to be prepared to pitch and get turned down often (D. Bonello, personal communication, September 17, 2009). She said the most important thing beginner journalists can do is to get online, create a space where they can show their work, and make it look good. Her Web site costs about $200 a year to run, she said.
“You have to be prepared to invest the time in yourself and develop those things, because, you know, to anyone, I’d say you’re going to at least give yourself six months to a year to get yourself up and running,” she said. She also recommends journalists meet as many people as possible once they arrive in a new country, and get in touch with nonprofits, read the newspapers, follow media coverage of the country, and “look under as many stones as possible.”
Payscale.com, a commercial Web site that gathers data on salaries, gives an annual median salary of $58,000 to $73,000 per year for foreign correspondents with 10 to 19 years of experience, but received data from only nine professionals to come up with that range. If these figures can be considered as a sort of guide to the payscale for foreign correspondents, then, naturally, starting correspondents can expect to make significantly less. But depending on where a journalist is living, considerably less could still be a good living.
Miranda Kennedy said she never bothered with pitching newspapers because the pay has long been low. While she eventually became a contract correspondent from India for the radio program “Marketplace” from American Public Media, she tried to hone in on outlets that have more money to offer, but might not be so high profile, such as a newspaper she found in the Persian Gulf that paid extremely well and preferred long pieces, and the nonprofit organization World Vision’s radio program, which also paid well. When first starting out, Kennedy also managed to get grant to train other radio journalists in South Asia for Pacifica Radio, which helped her out on the income front and helped her get acquainted with the region and its people.
She said India is an example of the kind of place where it really makes sense to go for those interested in becoming foreign correspondents. She also suggests that young journalists going abroad to report consider staying in the same place for an extended period, and living like the country’s citizens rather than sticking with other expatriates and diplomats in the nicer neighborhoods. Kennedy was originally scheduled to return to the United States after living in India for a year, but she decided to stay because she “hadn’t been able to really get a hold on the country.” She ended up living there for five years, and recently returned for five weeks as a fellow for the International Reporting Project. She’s also writing a book on the lives of six Indian women. Kennedy said young reporters particularly cannot go to someplace so different from the West understand the political and cultural intricacies without spending a great deal of time there.
And lastly, Nathalie Applewhite of the Pulitzer Center for Crisis Reporting recommends that those who feel passionately about becoming foreign correspondent just go rather than waiting for someone to give them a job or assignment or funding (N. Applewhite, personal communication, October 27, 2009).“This is not the kind of field where you sit around and wait for someone to believe in you,” she said. “Just spend the $1,000, make that investment. It’ll be the best investment you make.”
Works Cited
Baum, D. (2009, September 10). African bureau Tweets. Retrieved from http://www.danbaum.com/Nine_Lives/Africa_Bureau_tweets.html
Journalist Deborah Bonello advises newcomers to foreign correspondence to be prepared to pitch and get turned down often (D. Bonello, personal communication, September 17, 2009). She said the most important thing beginner journalists can do is to get online, create a space where they can show their work, and make it look good. Her Web site costs about $200 a year to run, she said.
“You have to be prepared to invest the time in yourself and develop those things, because, you know, to anyone, I’d say you’re going to at least give yourself six months to a year to get yourself up and running,” she said. She also recommends journalists meet as many people as possible once they arrive in a new country, and get in touch with nonprofits, read the newspapers, follow media coverage of the country, and “look under as many stones as possible.”
Payscale.com, a commercial Web site that gathers data on salaries, gives an annual median salary of $58,000 to $73,000 per year for foreign correspondents with 10 to 19 years of experience, but received data from only nine professionals to come up with that range. If these figures can be considered as a sort of guide to the payscale for foreign correspondents, then, naturally, starting correspondents can expect to make significantly less. But depending on where a journalist is living, considerably less could still be a good living.
Miranda Kennedy said she never bothered with pitching newspapers because the pay has long been low. While she eventually became a contract correspondent from India for the radio program “Marketplace” from American Public Media, she tried to hone in on outlets that have more money to offer, but might not be so high profile, such as a newspaper she found in the Persian Gulf that paid extremely well and preferred long pieces, and the nonprofit organization World Vision’s radio program, which also paid well. When first starting out, Kennedy also managed to get grant to train other radio journalists in South Asia for Pacifica Radio, which helped her out on the income front and helped her get acquainted with the region and its people.
She said India is an example of the kind of place where it really makes sense to go for those interested in becoming foreign correspondents. She also suggests that young journalists going abroad to report consider staying in the same place for an extended period, and living like the country’s citizens rather than sticking with other expatriates and diplomats in the nicer neighborhoods. Kennedy was originally scheduled to return to the United States after living in India for a year, but she decided to stay because she “hadn’t been able to really get a hold on the country.” She ended up living there for five years, and recently returned for five weeks as a fellow for the International Reporting Project. She’s also writing a book on the lives of six Indian women. Kennedy said young reporters particularly cannot go to someplace so different from the West understand the political and cultural intricacies without spending a great deal of time there.
And lastly, Nathalie Applewhite of the Pulitzer Center for Crisis Reporting recommends that those who feel passionately about becoming foreign correspondent just go rather than waiting for someone to give them a job or assignment or funding (N. Applewhite, personal communication, October 27, 2009).“This is not the kind of field where you sit around and wait for someone to believe in you,” she said. “Just spend the $1,000, make that investment. It’ll be the best investment you make.”
Works Cited
Baum, D. (2009, September 10). African bureau Tweets. Retrieved from http://www.danbaum.com/Nine_Lives/Africa_Bureau_tweets.html
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
