http://sambrook.typepad.com/sacredfacts/2010/02/is-the-foreign-correspondent-redundant.html

the events that are taking place in other countries have certainly an impact to us..

“that is the sound of extinction, coming to get you, bwanza” answered the eager stringer.

In the report (co-written with Prof Stephen Coleman and Dr Myria Georgiou from the University of Leeds, btw), the debate is less about whether there will be foreign correspondents in 5 years’ time, it’s more about the pluralism of voices that are available to the British national media, and how new media are facilitating this. This means pluralism in terms of ethnic origin, geographical location, political perspective, gender, socio-economic status – Peter Salmon even raises this directly about the BBC’s workforce itself. We ask our interviewees how they feel about this specifically in relation to news and documentaries, and some of the responses are for the status quo, some for a hybrid and some for a total re-evaluation…

Specifically on the BBC thing… Richard Sambrook is right to say that the World Service has hundreds of reporters and stringers indigenous to where they are reporting from – but they’re largely reporting to an international audience, not a UK audience. Here’s the actual recommendation from our report:

“The BBC has a new remit to ‘bring the world to the UK’ – it should develop a more ‘joined-up’ approach to international coverage, using the resources of the World Service and BBC World to help inform the UK audience, and build on existing links between UK communities and the wider world via its Nations and Regions output.”

oh, and this reminded me of you too: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6gmP4nk0EOE

I often send my colleagues links to sites like yours or blogs, written by journalists in i.e. Pakistan , but often I hear the answer: “I’ll check out Reuters to be sure, Kim ” .

Actually your proposal could give us a better foreign coverage – also because we’re firing our foreign correspondents . We’re loosing ad-money and we i.e. cut down on the freelancers and go to the bureau-material instead.

On the other hand: slowly more and more journalist get used to also checking sites like GV and other independent sources – but it takes time – too long time. So – something is happening , but we must speed up things.