In the future, there will be no “foreign correspondants.”
And I’m ok with that. Solana Larsen of Global Voices explains:
How many more years will we have to watch foreign correspondents parachute into a region and pretend they know what’s going on? How many more reports coming out of the Middle East from hotel rooftops will be delivered by people who do not speak Arabic, or know what “the Green zone” in Iraq was called before coalition forces arrived?
Not for long, is what I think. There are too many alternatives, and I’m not even referring to bloggers around the world. The type of thing we do at Global Voices is meant to be a service to professional journalists.
The founder of Alive in Baghdad, a fantastic video website that broadcasts weekly reports by Iraqi journalists, once told me in New York that he has a hell of a time getting news media organizations to recognize that his crew aren’t “citizen journalists” but actually, real, professional journalists who just happen to be Iraqi.
Sooner or later, qualified local perspectives will become what people prefer to hear, rather than what editors defer to when a situation becomes too dangerous for Western journalists to report from.
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