Ann Cooper and Taylor Owen are the editors of this report. Foreign correspondents have long been our interpreters of global events. Three interrelated trends now challenge this position. First, citizens living through events can tell the world about them directly via a range of digital technologies, without the need for the journalist intermediaries who were essential in the past to report and distribute the news.
Second, journalists have the ability to report on some events, particularly breaking news, without physically being there—by immersing themselves in streams of content, whether live video feeds from cell phones, Twitter feeds, or blog posts.
Finally, the financial pressures that digital technology have brought to legacy news media have forced many to close their international bureaus. Scores of the traditional foreign correspondents who worked in those bureaus have moved on to other careers, or to new jobs at digitally native media.
In this age of post-legacy media, local reporters, activists, ordinary citizens—and traditional foreign correspondents—are all now using digital technologies to inform the world of breaking news, and to offer analysis and opinions on global trends. In , calling the nontraditional forms of coverage they identified The New Global Journalism. The new practices require new skills. The population of experts who report and comment on the news has expanded to include eyewitnesses who can film, or photograph, or write about events and post their work immediately online.
Verifying the authenticity of these digital sources has become an important part of the skillset for international reporting. Also newly important is the ability to do immersion social-media reporting. And in this new age of government surveillance, traditional correspondents and new digital reporters must train themselves to use security tools that will keep their work and their sources secure.
