As world bureaus continue to downsize across North America, journalists working to sustain international news coverage should start by empowering local reporters on the ground.
When news broke out of The Washington Post cutting a third of its reporting staff, including its bureaus in Ukraine and the Middle East, it didn’t just signal another round of budget cuts, but also indicated a continued retreat from the traditional reporting model for international news.
In Canada, some outlets, including the Toronto Star have closed the doors on their world bureaus entirely. Others are dialing back on foreign correspondents and instead relying on wire services such as Agence France-Presse and Reuters to provide day-to-day coverage. A data analysis from The Hub estimated there could be less than 60 full-time journalists from mainstream news outlets covering international stories with 45 of those reporters working for CBC.
While the traditional model of relying on world bureaus for international news has been in decline for two decades since the arrival of digital platforms and advertising cuts, financial losses continue to impact how reporters cover the world.
In the midst of growing global political tensions, including Israel’s war on Gaza, Russia’s war on Ukraine, alongside the U.S.-Israel war on Iran, these cutbacks to global news coverage are narrowing the public’s access to critical information needed to fully grasp the current state of the world.
And yet, this decline of the traditional model also presents an opportunity for mainstream organizations to reimagine the ways in which they cover the world.
One opportunity is in building collaborative partnerships on the ground with local reporters and news publications. This relationship between foreign correspondents and local media workers has not always been a positive one. This is largely due to uneven power dynamics and lack of editorial control. In a 2019 research study analyzing the practices of global reporting, journalism scholars Shayna Plaut and Peter Klein noted that local media experts, often referred to as “fixers” in the traditional reporting model, often do not receive the same credit for their newsgathering as their flown-in counterparts.
While some media workers prefer anonymity for safety reasons, Plaut and Klein found that 48 percent of nearly 500 global media workers prefer public credit for providing local knowledge, translation, and source contacts.
Canadian journalist Chris Arsenault, who references Plaut’s and Klein’s study in his research on practical frameworks for more equitable collaboration and international newsgathering, notes that when local media experts receive credit for developing global stories, they tend to have minimal say over the final narrative. As a result, if a published piece lacks key details and nuance, it can damage their relationships with local sources and put their own safety at risk.
Saranaz Barforoush, an Iranian-Canadian journalist and assistant professor of teaching at the University of British Columbia School of Journalism, Writing and Media, believes the road to restructuring international reporting models starts with relationship building. This requires recognizing local media workers as reporting partners and rather than the “fixers” they are often labeled as.
“I believe that people will trust reporting that really takes care of those relationships and make sure that locally, they have good sources and good connections [that] tell the full picture of a story,” says Barforoush.
However, investing in this type of collaborative, nuanced reporting for international news stories can be challenging.
CBC’s senior director of newsgathering and lead of the newsroom’s national and international reporting, Tracy Seeley, says that the growing scale of global conflict has made it increasingly costly for news organizations to maintain permanent foreign bureaus. “There’s so much happening in the world that keeping up with it is challenging…there are always places that we wish we could be covering more,” she says.
Historically, news organizations invested in international bureaus as a way to connect international news to audiences away from the action. Rodrigo Zamith, associate professor and chair of the journalism department at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, writes how news organizations have invested in international bureaus to provide coverage on social, political, and environmental issues happening outside the newsroom’s headquarters, and connect foreign correspondents with local sources to provide context and insights on the culture of the country, city, or region.
However, Zamith also notes that the traditional approach to international reporting has become costly to maintain. “What was once an international symbol of organizational prestige and a reward for being a good journalist is now an easy target for budget cuts,” he writes.
“[International reporting] tends to be the most expensive type of reporting, so it makes sense, when you know media outlets are hurting financially, that that’s going to be the first thing that goes,” says Michelle Shephard, an independent journalist, filmmaker, and former national security reporter for the Star, where she reported from over 20 countries including Somalia, Yemen, and Sudan. After leaving the newspaper in 2018, Shephard began working as a freelancer and continued to report from those countries — though with adjusted budgets.
While some publications can afford to send her to report abroad, Shephard still faces difficulties covering other international reporting expenses on a freelance budget. For example, when she reported from Somalia, she was required to pay for insurance and security. On other reporting trips, she also had to cover additional costs such as accommodations, transportation, and in-field translation.
The collapse of foreign bureaus is also an opportunity to disrupt the traditional model of global news, which has centred western narratives. For now, however, the response emerges from the economic collapse of the traditional model. Seeing the financial pressures placed on global reporters and the fiscal funding to keep world bureaus afloat has led independent journalists like Shephard to forge partnerships with local media on the ground.
“Anytime you can have a partnership between an international journalist and a local journalist, you get some of the best coverage because you get the deep knowledge of someone who lives and understands the culture of the country that you’re covering,” says Shephard. “I could have never done the work I did, but also to do it safely without the help of journalists around the world.”
Though Barforoush recognizes world bureaus as valuable players in providing resources to spark these reporter-source relationships, she also points to independent journalism entities to help sustain professional connections in international news.
One journalist contributing to this line of work is Joanna Chiu, who has worked as an international reporter for newswires and the Star. Outside the newsroom, she has also launched NuVoices, a nonprofit international editorial collective spotlighting women and marginalized groups reporting on critical issues and events in China. This led to her founding Nuora Global Advisors, a global consultancy firm focused on providing insights on China and the Asia-Pacific region by connecting in-house journalists and researchers with a global network of media experts on the ground.
“We kind of think about global reporting and research and information gathering in a different way, a networked way where you don’t necessarily have to send a correspondent or researcher to a country,” says Chiu. “You can figure out who’s already on the ground there, or who has knowledge of that topic who could be anywhere in the world.”
These collaborative newsgathering approaches may not stop world bureaus from shrinking, but they can expand and diversify the coverage beyond the conflicts dominating major news headlines.
Although these are early shifts in this system, driven more by economic necessity than by a recognition of a more equity-based model for international coverage, it may force new conversations about how a fair, global reporting system could work. How could contracts be adapted and bylines be shared? Could a new revenue-sharing model be developed?
Such questions could drive forward more meaningful direction for a collaborative global reporting system. In the meantime, a reactive newsroom can still make significant strides in careful coverage of global news.
“There’s so many different resources and nonprofits that can help connect you with journalists around the world,” adds Chiu. She says the mindset shouldn’t be a competition, but a collaboration: making use of limited resources by working together, rather than against each other.
