It’s the Golden Age of News
By BILL KELLER, NYT
OVER the past 20 years, to loud laments from media veterans, American news organizations have retreated from the costly business of foreign coverage — closing bureaus, slashing space and airtime. Yet for the curious reader with a sense of direction, this is a time of unprecedented bounty.
I begin my day with this paper’s foreign staff — 75 reporters in 31 bureaus. I’ll listen to NPR at the gym, then look at The Wall Street Journal and The Financial Times, peruse the websites of The Guardian and the BBC, check my AP mobile app. Later I’ll visit Al Jazeera English for its “Syria’s War” blog, followed by the “Global” section of The Atlantic, the “Regions” tab at Foreign Affairs and some of the bloggers at Foreign Policy. If my Russian feels up to it, I’ll listen to a feed of the independent Moscow radio station Ekho Moskvy, and I’ll probably drop by a feisty news website called The Daily Maverick in another country I follow, South Africa. The #Turkey Twitter stream I set up for a reporting trip last summer has gone a little quiet lately, but YouTube has lots of indignant European officials fulminating about American eavesdropping. After all that, if I’m not sated, well, I’ve bookmarked onlinenewspapers.com, which links to thousands of papers and magazines.
Yes, there are fewer and fewer experienced correspondents out there, but I can now access all of them without leaving my desk, and most of this feast will be free. When auto-translate software gets better, I’ll even have access to news sources in Persian and Mandarin.
Not only that, but since the world got connected it’s become much harder for authoritarian regimes to hide news. In 1982, when President Hafez al-Assad of Syria crushed a rebel uprising by literally flattening the city of Hama, the story was little more than a rumor for months; and according to Thomas Friedman, who covered it for The Times, the only reason Assad eventually let journalists in to see the carnage was to give his subjects an object lesson in how troublemakers would be treated. Nowadays we can watch the atrocities perpetrated by Assad’s son Bashar on YouTube in real time.
(More here.)
OVER the past 20 years, to loud laments from media veterans, American news organizations have retreated from the costly business of foreign coverage — closing bureaus, slashing space and airtime. Yet for the curious reader with a sense of direction, this is a time of unprecedented bounty.
I begin my day with this paper’s foreign staff — 75 reporters in 31 bureaus. I’ll listen to NPR at the gym, then look at The Wall Street Journal and The Financial Times, peruse the websites of The Guardian and the BBC, check my AP mobile app. Later I’ll visit Al Jazeera English for its “Syria’s War” blog, followed by the “Global” section of The Atlantic, the “Regions” tab at Foreign Affairs and some of the bloggers at Foreign Policy. If my Russian feels up to it, I’ll listen to a feed of the independent Moscow radio station Ekho Moskvy, and I’ll probably drop by a feisty news website called The Daily Maverick in another country I follow, South Africa. The #Turkey Twitter stream I set up for a reporting trip last summer has gone a little quiet lately, but YouTube has lots of indignant European officials fulminating about American eavesdropping. After all that, if I’m not sated, well, I’ve bookmarked onlinenewspapers.com, which links to thousands of papers and magazines.
Yes, there are fewer and fewer experienced correspondents out there, but I can now access all of them without leaving my desk, and most of this feast will be free. When auto-translate software gets better, I’ll even have access to news sources in Persian and Mandarin.
Not only that, but since the world got connected it’s become much harder for authoritarian regimes to hide news. In 1982, when President Hafez al-Assad of Syria crushed a rebel uprising by literally flattening the city of Hama, the story was little more than a rumor for months; and according to Thomas Friedman, who covered it for The Times, the only reason Assad eventually let journalists in to see the carnage was to give his subjects an object lesson in how troublemakers would be treated. Nowadays we can watch the atrocities perpetrated by Assad’s son Bashar on YouTube in real time.
(More here.)
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