The Colorful Past and Uncertain Future of Foreign Reporting
From Foreign Policy.
Peter Osnos looks at Losing the News by Alex Jones and Journalism’s Roving Eye by John Maxwell Hamilton.
In Losing the News, Alex Jones, who won a Pulitzer Prize while at The New York Times and is now director of the Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy at Harvard University, addresses how the rise of the Internet and the precipitous decline in advertising have left print journalism, especially big-city newspapers, in desperate straits. Jones’ book is a cri de coeur. John Maxwell Hamilton’s
Journalism’s Roving Eye, meanwhile, is a prodigious account of a specific form of newsgathering — foreign correspondence — that has long been buffeted by pressures to cut costs and waning public interest in what happens abroad, even before the more recent challenges posed by the Internet. Journalism has a raffish and colorful past, but the annals of foreign reporting are particularly suited to the storytelling that Hamilton provides. His book is an expansive narrative that also underscores serious questions about what is happening now.