media - the demise of the foreign correspondent

An interesting but maybe too short discussion in the Shanghai Foreign Correspondents Club this evening, where I spoke on the demise of the classic foreign correspondent. According to my research the numbers are going down, with China and Brussels as the main exceptions. I find the end of the Cold War a much more defining moment than - the accepted assumption until last year - the economic crisis and the war against terror. Also I pleaded to look at weblogs as a possible tool to collect and distribute information in a not too long distance.
Two assumption were being challenged, especially by the American colleagues present. They wondered how solid my figures were. I took the relative changes in membership of Foreign Correspondent Clubs as my main benchmark. Because of localization and the sweatshop character of many newswires, they argued, the number seems to have gone up. I feel it is still a matter of defining the classic foreign correspondent. How good their work might be, basically locals are no foreign correspondents, that would even be linguistically not correct. On Hong Kong I had to admit that by comparing 1997 (400+) and 2003 (170) I was over the edge, since many colleagues moved to Hong Kong to report on the handover.
More serious was their suggestion that in the US the changes in the US have not been that great. The TV-stations have been wastelands for two decades and most newspapers never had any interesting in what was happening abroad. So, my story might be correct for Europe, but not for the US. The UK still has 12 national newspapers, the Netherlands six: numbers the US cannot match and a much larger diversity. Main problem: is the Cold War a good defining moment for the change in foreign correspondence?