Images of TV correspondents standing in front of a landmark in a foreign capital or in a disaster area have almost become a part of popular culture. Yet, while permanent correspondents still play an important role within the structures of foreign reporting, the roles and job descriptions in international coverage have become more diversified in recent years.
Foreign correspondents – sometimes called international correspondents – might be employees of their newsrooms at home or work as freelancers serving various outlets. They may work in overseas news bureaus and even have staff to help them carry out their tasks, or they may be on their own with no major infrastructure provided by their employer. Both types of correspondents often rely on the support of fixers.
While some live abroad for years or even permanently, others stay for shorter periods only. Major news organizations may even have a rule limiting the period of time their correspondents can be sent to a particular country (i.e., not more than three years) to avoid them “going native”. This describes a (presumed) tendency that staying longer would attach correspondents too much to the culture of the foreign country, ultimately causing them to fail to provide adequate coverage for audiences at home. Others argue that, by contrast, living abroad permanently actually enables the international journalist to really understand a foreign culture, leading to more contextualized and less biased and domesticated coverage. In this regard, there have been calls to entrust at least some international reporting to foreign nationals “explaining” “their” countries to audiences abroad.
A large network of correspondents has for long time been a key performance marker of quality media in many Western countries. But newspapers in particular have faced shrinking budgets in recent years, meaning that only a few organizations can afford to maintain expensive networks of news bureaus. Also, innovations in technology such as the World Wide Web, as well as globalization processes, have arguably opened new opportunities for international reporting, making it easier to report events abroad from headquarters rather than from overseas. There is fear that these developments come at the expense of the long-term perspective provided by permanent correspondents, making foreign correspondents redundant. In some countries, only a few major newsrooms (or even none) are able to invest in permanent overseas correspondents. News media in these countries may therefore rely heavily on international news agencies.
Scholars John Maxwell Hamilton and Eric Jenner developed a typology of foreign correspondents. Alongside the traditional foreign correspondent, their model includes, amongst others, parachute journalists, which are sent abroad only temporarily when something happens. Foreign correspondents are foreign nationals serving as correspondents. In-house foreign correspondents cover stories from abroad from the news organization’s headquarters. Amateur correspondents have not gained the prominence expected by many in the early years of the World Wide Web. However, footage provided by citizens and information from social media do have their place in international reporting, especially when it comes to covering war and conflict zones.
