Lessons on foreign reporting

An interview with Marcus Brauchli, Executive Editor, The Washington Post

By Joe Pavlish

(Editor’s Note: Brauchli spent much of his career as a foreign correspondent for The Wall Street Journal. He was based in Hong Kong, Stockholm, Tokyo and Shanghai.)

What did you love and hate as a foreign correspondent?

I think the opportunity to see so much of how the rest of the world operates is always fascinating, and it’s kind of an adventure to be in a place where you don’t know what’s going to happen every day. In part because you maybe don’t know the culture, are new to a country or place or may not speak the language. It’s kind of exhilarating to be in a place where you’re constantly being challenged like that. I think that Americans in general don’t have a deep enough understanding of how the rest of the world works or thinks, and the chance to be able to try to understand the world and convey that understanding back is really extraordinary.

How is the United States doing in reporting foreign journalism?

I think the number of people in the U.S. who deal with the rest of the world is increasing, and the U.S. does have a fairly sophisticated understanding of the world. As a country we have a pretty sophisticated understanding of the world, and as a government, we have a pretty sophisticated understanding of the world. It’s impossible for the U.S. not to pay attention to the world because the U.S. gets pulled into almost anything in the world by virtue of its status as what Madeleine Albright, I think, called the “essential power.”

So, in terms of how I see foreign correspondents today in comparison to the past, the truth is — and this is something that’s widely overlooked — there are more foreign correspondents today; there are more correspondents in the world reporting information at a more granular level today than there have ever been in the past. The volume and quality of information coming to interested readers is far better than it’s ever been. That is because countries have opened up, the global economy has integrated more tightly, the ability to communicate and to travel is superior to what it’s ever been and the fact that the economy and the markets are so much more global means that there is great demand for information in one part of the world about another part of the world.

I think that the level of information that’s available in the world today is better than it’s ever been. The quality of journalism in the world is actually quite high, the quality of international correspondents. … I think the world has changed and the kind of information people want and the kind of information that’s available is superior to what existed before.

What do you do if you don’t have a foreign correspondent in an important country?

Our approach to covering the world is not the same as AP or Reuters or Bloomberg, who think they have to cover basically everything that moves. Our view is: We’re not going to be a paper of record; we’re not going to cover everything that happens. We’re going to try and identify those stories that matter most to our audience. We know that our audience comes to us expecting us to be authoritative on things Washington. Either seeing the world a bit from a Washington prism, not entirely, but at least trying to write about things in a way that makes sense for an audience in Washington that would include policymakers and legislators and the World Bank and the [International Monetary Fund] and the people working the Pentagon or federal agencies in Washington but also for people who come wanting to understand what is important in Washington. We can’t cover everything, but we don’t think we have to cover everything. … We’re looking for stories that will, as much as possible, anticipate the news rather than simply report what happened in the news.

We spend a lot of time trying to anticipate and address larger questions to give people more context and understanding, and we worry a little bit less about covering minute-to-minute developments because we think we can get a lot of that from news services and, frankly, we think a lot of people follow that online or on television in a way that we’re not going to necessarily bring any value to it. So we focus on our journalism in a way that we think we can bring more understanding rather than just bringing back the same facts that everybody else is delivering.

What do you take into account when deciding how to cover a foreign story?

For example, an earthquake strikes Christchurch, New Zealand. Devastating earthquake. A large number of people are killed; it’s a national tragedy in New Zealand. I don’t think we would have seen any real reason to send a correspondent to that because there was no obvious way in which we were going to add any value, and there were no longer effects of that earthquake outside of New Zealand, as tragic as it was.

By contrast, when the earthquake and tsunami hit Japan, we understood immediately this was, first of all, a much larger tragedy, both in terms of loss of life and economic damage. But Japan is a country that is a close U.S. ally, the third largest economy in the world — or by some counts the second largest economy in the world still — and this was going to be a highly disruptive event for the economy. It was going to require interesting responses of a Japanese government that has been challenged in recent years and has not been a strong government in recent decades. And then overlaid on top of that very quickly was this nuclear power plant debacle, and again we saw that as something that does have a lot of repercussions for the rest of the world because it goes directly to the question whether nuclear power is safe and sustainable. Again it goes to the question of whether Japan is going to be able to maintain its economy and whether the government is able to respond to a crisis like this. It goes to whether the government itself is going to be able to survive or perhaps even if their system or approach to government is going to survive.

There are a lot of really large questions that come into play very quickly that do have big implications for the U.S. and the rest of the world, and so we try to get on that. … It has a lot of dimensions that immediately matter to us and to our readers so we put more people on that story.

So the calculus every time is: Do we have something to add, how essential and relevant is this to our readers to know and then what do we have to contribute to it to make it a broader, more ambitious and essential story for our readers?

How could U.S. foreign reporting be better?

I think if you actually had the time to look at all the foreign coverage that appears every day in American media outlets, you would find that it’s pretty robust. The challenge remains telling people about things they don’t know about, not just doing your version of what everybody else is doing. This is true of all journalism, not just international coverage. I think too much of journalism remains a sort of “me too” enterprise, where everybody is sort of traveling in a pack and covering the same story and delivering their version of it. That to me is somewhat unnecessary because, as we all know now, it’s all visible to all of us and there’s probably greater advantage in doing not just your version of the same story everybody else is doing, unless you truly can add something significant and some real value to it. But in finding stories that people aren’t aware of and telling people things that they need to know but they don’t know and in bringing places and people and things to light and to life in a way that will be compelling and engaging so that our audience will learn about issues and places and subjects that they don’t know about.

So perhaps what I’m saying is that American journalism probably would be slightly better served if it was a bit more adventurous in what it covered and if it didn’t so often just move in a pack in the same direction.

How has the world’s increasing connectedness affected foreign journalism, and how will it affect journalism in the future?

Well there are certain advantages in being able to see what everybody else is writing. I mean, if something happens during the uprisings recently in the Middle East and North Africa, I found myself often watching Al-Jazeera’s English-language streaming video website, which was great. I mean, it was really interesting and took you there in a way that CNN and MSNBC and broadcast networks in this country just didn’t — just much more detailed and granular journalism. What the Internet has done though is it has also torn down a lot of the walls that protected newspapers or other news organizations because they served a community and that community had only access to what information the community news organization was providing it. Today, if your local paper doesn’t cover international news well but you’re interested in the world, it doesn’t matter to you. You can find plenty of international news that you could never have found before.

That sort of raises the challenge for all of us: How do we ensure that we remain the primary providers of news and information to our core audiences? That requires much more awareness of what the competitive landscape is and much closer focus on what it is that we know and have and can produce that they won’t get elsewhere.