Abstract
The quantity of international news published is growing, but readers are getting less information. With pressure on foreign budgets across established media, new entrants exploit the same terrain, benefiting from a technological transformation that is having greater impact on the international news available to a British audience than any development since the Victorian invention of the telegraph.
The newcomers are not bringing closely observed foreign reporting, but – too often – a superficial gloss and self-interested commentary A lot of content generated by new players, mainly American new media, is a variation on a mid-Atlantic narrative tone pioneered by Time and Newsweek in their heyday. This output has the distinguishing characteristic of lacking a sense of time and place. It frequently lacks the depth to be truly remarkable. Even when the reporters win special access, the execution often fails to exploit the advantage.
Looking past the reporting style, the product seems first rate. Special emphasis is placed on the visual, with video packages, lists and data-driven graphics aggressively pushed to turbocharge the material.
And of course the editors of the new media entrants have resources that can't be matched by their more established rivals. One West Coast site boasts a roving correspondent in Europe whose goal is to travel to “one country, one month”. It is hard to avoid the suspicion that this is largely travel for the sake of it.
How can this largesse exist at a time when there is so much angst surrounding the future of reporting? One explanation is that new media doesn't conform to standard editorial resource constraints. Time may have sunk hundreds of millions into its product over decades, but it has long since spent its reserves and exists now on its annual profit and revenue wits. The dynamic Vice Media, on the other hand, has a cash pile it is using to make an impact.
Most British media groups say foreign coverage is vital to attract a globalised audience. MailOnline has ambitious plans for coverage. Executives promise the new global homepage will be filled with first-hand reportage, not just clickbait. The Guardian has internationalised, with operations in America and Australia, and plans for more to come. The Times runs primetime advertisements that feature foreign correspondents and brave photographers. The Financial Times invests to serve the needs of its far-flung readership. Yet the constraints of the new financial reality lurk beneath the surface.
Three big foreign news stories at the outset of 2015 demonstrated the effects of this changing world: German chancellor Angela Merkel's new year address discussing anti-Muslim demonstrations in Germany's largest cities; the attack on the offices of satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo in Paris; the president of Sri Lanka, Mahinda Rajapaksa, losing his job in a dramatic election upset. The established media and a raft of upstarts provided much the same output: live blogs monitored developments, quick profiles of the main players flooded forth, Twitter-informed storyboards were constructed and instant analysis provided guides to events.
We expect events like the Charlie Hebdo massacre to be thoroughly covered, but there was a surfeit of home news reporters roving the streets of Paris in the first days of the tragedy. Too many headlines contained the British angle, important undercurrents were neglected as the story died away.
Germany's Pegida movement caught editors on the hop and it took publications weeks to get to grips with the backlash against Muslims. No surprise, perhaps, when only a handful of staff correspondents are posted in Europe's most important country.
And while few of us are likely to be affected personally by the change of government in Sri Lanka, the comparative lack of coverage mattered: the brutal climax to the war with the Tamil Tigers placed Sri Lanka high up the global news at the time. There is a shop owner in south London who will remain in the interested category. I know this because he has diligently cut out pages from British newspapers that relate the sins of the old regime, pasting the coverage in his window. There has been just about enough newsprint to ensure the pages in the window don't turn yellow. But for how much longer?
What are the alternatives for an audience losing out in this shift of media focus? What is gone cannot be restored. With many established papers forfeiting large parts of the news agenda, a new establishment of analysts and commentators swells. As on-the-spot news analysis and closely worked up pieces of reportage become a luxury, a new tribe of armchair correspondents finds a role.
Not all of this output comes from the motivated amateur. Interest groups are seizing the opportunity to spread their views, often producing arguments that are presented as disinterested analysis. The websites of think tanks strive for shares, retweets or linking of instant commentary.
Commentators use their own Facebook pages to float ideas or reactions and hope for uptake, perhaps a request to write or appear on television news. Everybody has a daily thought on Syria, or at least they did in 2014. Too many of these pieces are based on second-hand information rather than first-hand reporting.
If we are to find the depth of coverage that was once ours for the price of a daily broadsheet, or an hour invested in front of the evening broadcast news, we need to work hard to seek out the real reporting that was so readily available. Despite the proliferation of electronic distribution, most readers can't or won't devote much energy to curating their own supply. News can be shared at the click of the button, but the news we share is shrinking.