A person could be forgiven thinking Ben Johnson’s seat was spring-loaded the way he launched himself at the panel of experts that the OPC organized recently to discuss The Crisis in Foreign News Reporting.
The OPC presented the panel as part of “Surviving the Storm: How to Weather the Tough Times in Journalism,” the theme of the Society of Professional Journalists’ 2010 Spring Conference. Hosted by the Deadline Club and the Connecticut and New Jersey professional chapters of SPJ, the conference brought hundreds of journalists from around the nation to the City University of New York Graduate School of Journalism’s midtown Manhattan campus.
Johnson, a senior at Southern Connecticut State University about to graduate with a journalism degree, said that William Holstein, president of the OPC Foundation; Dorinda Elliott, a member of the OPC Board; Marcus Mabry, New York Times associate national editor; and veteran foreign correspondent Craig R. Whitney, who retired recently after 44 years at The New York Times, all gave very useful advice. Although the panel was charged with discussing changes in international news reporting over the past generation, particularly as news organizations continue their wholesale retreat from covering international news, the panelists were very encouraging to the students and young professional in the room.
“What we’re saying to you is it’s a sacred craft,” Holstein said at one point, “it’s a sacred calling we’ve been involved in, being the eyes and ears of the American democracy on the ground in a place where something important was happening and it was our job to explain that to an American audience.”
It might have been an “unfair statement” for a graybeard to make to a young, idealistic, and highly impressionable group of people.
“I’m inspired, absolutely,” Johnson said. “It’s really eye opening. I liked it a lot. It was really great to have people of that caliber working in foreign correspondence position. I’ve always been interested in that as a potential career option down the road. So this really gave me inspiration.”
Mabry managed the difficult task of being both brutally honest about the bleak outlook for young people aspiring to become foreign correspondent, yet encouraging them at the same time that it is not a hopeless ambition.
“There are fewer foreign correspondents jobs. So? There are foreign correspondents jobs. There will continue to be foreign correspondents jobs. If you are dedicated, you could be one of those foreign correspondents. That’s what it’s about,” he said.
Holstein had noted at the start of the late afternoon event that his audience was “mostly the young, early career.”
“Our mission is to give you a presentation about the crisis in America’s coverage of the world,” he said. “It may be that what you want to hear more about is how to get started in this career, if we haven’t scared you off by then.”
Each panelist managed to balance every bit of bad news they imparted with something either encouraging, or inspirational.
Elliott was insistent that those who aspire to a career as a foreign correspondent should first learn a language, then go to a place where they could put that language to use and get to work. That was what she did as a young person leaving school. She studied Chinese and, upon graduation, applied to “a zillion” newspapers and magazines in Asia for jobs. She got “a zillion rejections.”
One acceptance was from the Asia Wall Street Journal, which offered a post in Hong Kong on the graveyard shift working from 11 p.m. to 7 a.m., thus was launched a classic foreign correspondent’s experience. Elliott, who married Adi Ignatius of the Wall Street Journal and raised three children overseas, would serve in Beijing and Moscow, among other outposts, for BusinessWeek and Newsweek.
Holstein and Mabry followed the path of being hired domestically by their respective news organizations before their eventual posting overseas. Mabry joined Newsweek as a business reporter before being posted as a correspondent to Paris, later becoming bureau chief, then chief of correspondents.
Holstein started with United Press International in Lansing, Michigan, then coming to New York after expressing interest in becoming a foreign correspondent. In the late 1970s, President Jimmy Carter normalized U.S. relations with China.
“They needed more young meat to throw at the story so I was soon on the plane to Hong Kong,” Holstein said. “I spent two years covering the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, the OPEC summit in Bali, Indonesia, the Tokyo Economic Summit in 1979, and, subsequently, was transferred to Beijing.”
Whitney’s career start was both routine and startlingly unique.
As a college student, he got his journalism training by working for the Worcester (MA) Telegram as a reporter for two years. He then served a year’s clerkship for legendary New York Times columnist “Scotty” James Reston. But, with his draft board breathing down his neck, Whitney joined the U.S. Navy in 1965. He spent three years as an officer in the Navy, two of those years writing speeches in Washington and then a year in Saigon as a press escort officer. That year enabled him to move all over Vietnam, in all the battle areas.
On getting out, Whitney was set to start at Times as reporter on the Federal Court beat when then Managing Editor Seymour Topping asked if he would like to return to Vietnam as a foreign correspondent for the Times.
“What I’d always wanted to do since I got into journalism is be a foreign correspondent,” Whitney said. “I spoke French, had studied French and German. Ironically, it was the Navy that got me my foreign correspondent’s job.”
Whitney pointed out that the lesson from his experience as another path into a journalism career.
“One of the most useful is if you know something. If you have a skill set, or a background, that can be useful to journalism, that you acquired in some other areas,” he said. “Nowadays, and it’s going to be a little dangerous to suggest this because of the risks involved, but one of the biggest areas that journalists have no exposure to, that’s very important, is the military. There are worse things that some of you could do than to join the military for two or three years to see what it’s all about then you can come back and find that you’re one of a rare breed of journalists who know something about the military.”
But, no matter how they started, one aspect of each of these distinguished journalists’ career would be hard to duplicate by many of their very interested audience members: the fully paid and subsidized staff position at a major news organization. The “Gravy Train,” as Elliott described, has ended. She even had two housing subsidies because of her husband’s position, “all kinds of comforts that companies just don’t have the money for these days.”
Mabry remembers, as a 25-year-old foreign correspondent for Newsweek, serving champagne and foie gras to a group of sources at his Paris house, which overlooked the Seine River. Later, as chief of correspondents in charge of magazine’s foreign coverage budget, he would rein in such expenses for correspondents.
Where every network had a full-fledge bureau, news organizations that even have a presence tend to depend on locals for facts on the ground, including video and audio.
Yet, Elliott said, not only is a career as a foreign correspondent doable but “you cannot possibly have a more exciting life, just to give my personal feeling, you cannot possibly have a more exciting life than going overseas and covering the world.”
The OPC Foundation does its part by giving 12 scholarships annually and honoring the winners at its annual scholarship luncheon where they are introduced to people in the media, take tours of media companies and coordinate internships abroad.