International reporting

If you have ever worked for a newspaper, even if for only a school paper, you will have some inkling of the reporters job. If you can leap from your hometown to your country to the world, you can gain some measure of understanding about one truth, all reporters face the same conditions in greater or smaller measure. Reporting the news internationally is the same as reporting the news about a class event. You have to find the story or the story has to find you. You have to be accurate as to the persons, the time, and the place of the event.

You have to write the story to fit the expectation of your editor. You have to accept the consequences by knowing that if your name goes as credit so will any ensuing problem from the people that you have reported on. That is one reason why news agencies appear to work in packs, for mutual protection. You might think that international reporting and trying to issue a news story to the press might be more dangerous in Afghanistan than in New York, and you might be right. For example a news story on September 9, 2009, reported by fox news is a press release on the efforts of British agents who freed a New York Times reporter being held captive by the Taliban. That type of press release is immediately of interest to people in the United States and maybe in England. It will take the other international news agencies some time to filter through, get the particulars and pass the story on to its listening, or reading subscribers. And, that is another point of general interest. International press agencies think that they know the interests of their subscribers. If they didn't they would lose the support of their subscribers probably even in countries that would have people looking elsewhere than their own countries reporters for the events of the world.