After the worst earthquake in 200 years hit Haiti Tuesday night, Columbia Journalism Review's Alexandra Fenwick reported that the Associated Press's Jonathan M. Katz was the only foreign correspondent still stationed there (though two other wire services employed Haitians).
Without the immediacy of on-the-ground reporting, venerable institutions like the New York Times reverted to compiling the kind of unfiltered, anonymous first-hand accounts that would have been unthinkable even a year ago, primarily in the form of a Twitter feed.
That left Choire Sicha over at The Awl disgusted, and prompted Wonkette editor Ken Layne to comment:
Remember when that Canadian radio program got kind of famous for just calling a payphone in some hot news spot because they had no budget or bureaus? Now that’s the . . . New York Times, and the payphone is . . . Twitter.But the bigger tragedy is that people are still clearly hungry for newslike this — cable is full of Haiti coverage, with majornetworks having expanded newscast hours — and no one's there to provideit to them. Sure, all the major news organizations hitched rides withaid organizations to get down there afterward. But earthquake coverage in the aftermathis different from covering the earthquake.
Before coming to TAP this month, I worked in newspapers for five years. The last two were spent as a reporter at the Stamford Advocate, a Connecticut newspaper that's operated continuously for almost two centuries. In 1978, it won a Pulitzer Prize for uncovering local corruption, and still enjoys a reputation as a good local paper.
Even institutions that have enough reporters left don't have enough money to invest in a reporter who can become ingrained in a faraway place. Foreign bureaus are expensive.The Washington Post's editor, Marcus W. Brauchli, told a Post columnist last year that foreign coverage costs between $5 million and $10 million a year.
Which just reinforces what Mark Bowden wrote last May in Vanity Fair; good journalism costs money. Plenty of organizations are trying to think of new ways for people to pay, but I've always been afraid readers have no idea how high the cost for real reporting really is.
— Monica Potts
