media - Less investments in foreign correspondence

Thomas Crampton documents for the International Herald Tribune and his weblog the different strategies of US weeklies in the way they cover the world outside the US.

The wave of "cutbacks at these major U.S. news weeklies overseas is a significant event," said Doug Arthur, a New York-based publishing analyst at Morgan Stanley. "You cannot help but see this as a major retreat."

It is not new and certainly not confined to the US. In December last year the largest Dutch Daily De Telegraaf announced to would call back all its eightteen foreign correspondents but two, while most media companies divide the pain over a couple of years.
Thomas was the president of the Hong Kong Foreign Correspondents Club, when I was the president of the Shanghai Foreign Correspondents Club in 2002 and the issue came up more than once in our exchanges. I was then more hopeful cyberspace could fill in some of the gaps and while there still are encouraging initiative the downturn might be going much faster than the emergence of anything that could look like an alternative.
To elaborate a bit more on the issue: while the revenue of the internet media are only a fraction of the total media revenue from advertisements, they both face a common danger from the internet: the Craiglists, Ebays and others who effectively erode traditional revenue for all media. Traditional media companies have two extreme ways of dealing with the crisis. Or they use an exit-strategy, minimize costs, maximize profits and hope to sell of a dead horse before the next owner knows he gets a dead horse.
Second strategy is investing in online media. Traditional media still have the capital for experiments and if they do not invest, nobody else will. Their strategy needs to include new ways of talking to their audiences, but also developing new ways to generate income, as the old ways are dying.