A Dying Breed?

I'm Barry Petersen and this Letter From Asia comes from Tokyo.

It's not always easy being a foreign correspondent here…budgets are tight, and with the Internet the amount of information is exploding. We compared notes with Jim Brooke of The New York Times who is also based in Tokyo, and has tracked changes in the number of newspaper correspondents based here.

"Here in Japan, there's been a great shrinkage," Brooke explained. "The L.A. Times has gone from three people in a bureau to one guy working out of his house. When I got here I replaced two people. When I leave I probably will not be replaced."

The same is true with the networks…CBS and CNN remain, but both NBC and ABC news have effectively closed their bureaus here.

So where have all the reporters gone? To China.

There's much more interest where I work for the China stories than there is for the Japan stories, whereas a few years ago it was probably quite the opposite. What about at the Times? We asked Brooke.

"Yep, I think we have five people in China. China is an exciting story because it's moving," Brooke replied.

It's the same for us. Asia producer Alec Sirken and I spend half our year in China.
And like journalists everywhere these days, we face a new challenge…the internet.

We also asked Brooke is he thought we're a threatened species, foreign correspondents.

"You know, the upside, as least for The New York Times, is that twice as many people are reading us now through the internet," he said. "The downside is they're not paying for it."

Yes, they are reading Jim…and watching me and my CBS colleagues on the web. And maybe the sheer explosiveness of the web and the search engines and the blogging…work in our favor.

"I think the reason people pay for the N.Y. Times or CBS is to get seasoned, smart impartial assessment of what's going on," Brooke explained. "There's a lot of stuff out there on the Internet blogs and opinions and you kind of want someone to sort through what's important."

There was a time when a foreign correspondent's job was go and simply report what we saw. Now we try and make sense of what we're seeing so we can explain it. That may be a lot more difficult, but in this day and age…there is no going back.
by Barry Petersen