Couple of f’rinstances. Some years back, the Detroit paper wanted to set up a bureau in Germany, mainly to report on the automotive business. A good fit, something you would expect a metropolitan daily from a city with a strong economic interest to tackle. Sending a staff person to do this job would have cost on the order of a quarter million a year. That’s a little rough on the bottom line. Does the Houston paper have a bureau in Saudi, or somewhere else crucial to the oil business? If not, there’s probably an economic reason why.

When I worked for an English-language paper in Budapest, one of our writers was also the correspondent for one of the UK papers. Lovely person, but had to juggle numerous things to make ends meet, and that was as someone young and single. If she had had family responsibilities, it would not have worked.

The leading German papers (SZ and FAZ) do have decent networks of correspondent. The FAZ, for instance, had three in Moscow for many years. But those papers cost on the order of EUR 1.50 for a daily edition and are almost entirely supported by their subscriptions and newsstand sales. That model does not work in the US.

I don’t have a vision of what does work, but I thought some experience from the field might be of interest.

If there’s no support for public interest – just what interests the public – it doesn’t get coverage.

One can say it’s hindsight, but I think this seems kind of obvious. At least to anyone who heard it all before. It’s a tribute to the way blogging has been marketed by demagogues and hucksters, that the reality has to be so frequently rediscovered.

We’ll know this cycle has gotten into academe when Cass Sunstein writes a book about it. Looks like that’s still a few years in the future.

Seabird