Foreign reportingis a type of journalistic reporting that covers events and developments abroad, as opposed to the coverage of domestic issues. The terms foreign coverage, international reporting and international coverage are often used interchangeably. Such reporting may include a vast range of issues, such as politics, economics, culture, or sports. Yet, research has often highlighted the focus on war, conflict, and catastrophes in foreign coverage, pointing towards a perceived preponderance of negativity in the way international news are reported.
National systems of foreign reporting function within their own structures. While one might typically think of foreign correspondents as the protagonists of disseminating international news, structures of foreign coverage are much more diverse, including major international news agencies, foreign reporting conducted from news desks in the respective domestic country, or by reporters sent abroad just to cover a certain event or development. Recently, discourses in research and professional ethics have also shed light on the role played by so-called fixers or stringers. These are locals, often journalists themselves, who help international reporters to gather their stories.
Boundaries between national and international issues though seem to be blurring nowadays; the Europeanization of politics and economics within EU member states and the impact of climate change just being two examples of many. Consequently, it is hard to distinguish between what is to be termed domestic news and what is to be coined international news, especially if we understand both categories to be distinct news genres.
Despite such globalizing developments, international reporting is often accused of still being rooted in and furthering bias and stereotypes about foreign countries and a perceived world order. Likewise, the domestication of foreign news has raised criticism. Another frequent claim is that foreign coverage tends to follow the stance of national governments on foreign policy, neglecting the watchdog function of journalism in this field.
This has led to criticism on geographies of news, defined as the major news flows among countries or world regions, such as between the Global North and the Global South. It also has sparked calls for a global journalism, understood as a means to overcome national bias and provincialism in foreign coverage by pointing out global interdependencies across cultures. Cross-border journalism is often referred to as another means to tackle national bias and to innovate how international news is reported.
