CHICAGO: Newspapers are doing themselves and their readers a disservice by so strictly obeying the industry’s latest mantra, former Chicago Tribune foreign correspondent Richard C. Longworth argues. “Local news dominates, and it’s not just local, but ‘local, local, local’ they’ve gotta repeat it three times -- and it’s coming at the expense of the newshole for international news,” he says.
The flagging interest in international news is especially critical among Midwestern newspapers, Longworth says: “The Chicago Tribune is the only newspaper between the two coasts with its own foreign correspondents. Some occasionally send reporters overseas, but that’s just sporadic.”
There’s a certain irony in that because in the dawn of the 20th century, some smaller newspapers in the Plains, such as the Emporia (Kan.) Gazette were intensely interested in foreign affairs. The Kansas City Star even sent a young writer named Ernest Hemingway abroad.
In an attempt to revive that spirit, the Global Chicago Center of the Chicago Council on Foreign Relations (CCFR) is conducting a series of monthly seminars for Midwest newspapers on such international news topics as global agriculture and energy resources, globalization and industry in the Midwest, and immigration. This year, 10 newspapers, ranging in size from the Ames (Iowa) Tribune to the Minneapolis Star Tribune, sent reporters and editors to the CCFR’s two-year Midwest Media Project, which is funded by a $250,000 Ford Foundation grant.
“The purpose of the Midwest Media Project is to make the global local,” says Longworth, executive director of CCFR’s Global Chicago Center. Globalization is dramatically transforming the Midwestern economy and demographics, he adds. “When your town and your beat are being transformed by all these global pressures you’ve got to be able to tell your readers,” he says.
Business writer John Nolan is one of seven journalists the Dayton (Ohio) Daily News has sent to the seminars. “I think the paper looks at it as a way for people recharge their batteries,” Nolan says in an interview at mid-June seminar devoted to energy and environmental issues.
At that seminar, reporters heard Henry Henderson, the city of Chicago’s first environmental commissioner, complain that newspaper coverage of global warming “dwells in a semi-idiotic level” of simplistic he-said, she-said reporting.
The seminar left Nancy Gaarder, the energy reporter for the Omaha (Neb.) World-Herald, pondering how to balance the global and local coverage. “The question is, how do you get the time to write (about international issues) when you need to be out writing about hometown problems,” she says.
Mark Fitzgerald (mfitzgerald@editorandpublisher.com) is a senior editor at E&P.
