As a young girl in a working-class neighborhood of Sydney, Australia, Geraldine Brooks longed to discover the places where history happens and culture comes from, so she enlisted pen pals who offered her a window on adolescence in the Middle East, Europe, and America. Twenty years later Brooks, an award-winning foreign correspondent, embarked on a human treasure hunt to find her pen friends. She found men and women whose lives had been shaped by war and hatred, by fame and notoriety, and by the ravages of mental illness. Intimate, moving, and often humorous, Foreign Correspondence speaks to the unquiet heart of every girl who has ever yearned to become a woman of the world.

David Greenway, a journalist’s journalist in the tradition of Michael Herr, David Halberstam, and Dexter Filkins. In this vivid memoir, he tells us what it’s like to report a war up close. Reporter David Greenway was at the White House the day Kennedy was assassinated. He was in the jungles of Vietnam in that war’s most dangerous days, and left Saigon by helicopter from the American embassy as the city was falling. He was with Sean Flynn when Flynn decided to get an entire New Guinea village high on hash, and with him hours before he disappeared in Cambodia. He escorted John le Carre around South East Asia as he researched The Honourable Schoolboy. He was wounded in Vietnam and awarded a Bronze Star for rescuing a Marine. He was with Sidney Schanberg and Dith Pran in Phnom Penh before the city descended into the killing fields of the Khmer Rouge. Greenway covered Sadat in Jerusalem, civil war and bombing in Lebanon, ethnic cleansing and genocide the Balkans, the Gulf Wars (both), and reported from Afghanistan and Iraq as they collapsed into civil war. This is a great adventure story—the life of a war correspondent on the front lines for five decades, eye-witness to come of the most violent and heroic scenes in recent history.

Foreign News gives us a fascinating, behind-the-scenes look into the practices of the global tribe we call foreign correspondents. Exploring how they work, Ulf Hannerz also compares the ways correspondents and anthropologists report from one part of the world to another. Hannerz draws on extensive interviews with correspondents in cities as diverse as Jerusalem, Tokyo, and Johannesburg. He shows not only how different story lines evolve in different correspondent beats, but also how the correspondents' home country and personal interests influence the stories they write. Reporting can go well beyond coverage of a specific event, using the news instead to reveal deeper insights into a country or a people to link them to long-term trends or structures of global significance. Ultimately, Hannerz argues that both anthropologists and foreign correspondents can learn from each other in their efforts to educate a public about events and peoples far beyond our homelands. The result of nearly a decade's worth of work, Foreign News is a provocative study that will appeal to both general readers and those concerned with globalization.

The book studies the current trends of foreign correspondence in Europe. The EU’s expansion has had abundant effects on news coverage and some of the European capitals have become home to the biggest international press corps in world. So, who are these "professional strangers" stationed in Europe and how do they try to make their stories, that are clearly important in today’s interconnected world, interesting for viewers and readers? This book represents the first Pan-European study of foreign correspondents and their reporting. It includes chapters from 27 countries, and it aims to study them and the direction, flow and pattern of their coverage, as well as answer questions regarding the impact of new technologies on the quantity, frequency and speed of their coverage. Do more sophisticated communications tools yield better international news coverage of Europe? Or does the audience’s increasing apathy and the downsizing of the foreign bureaus offset these advances? And how do the seemingly unstoppable media trends of convergence, commercialization, concentration, and globalization affect the way Europe and individual European countries are reported?

There are as many as 3,400 correspondents covering the United States, among them approximately 600 print and broadcast correspondents from European countries. The importance of the foreign correspondents corps stationed in the United States and of their work has increased commensurate with the world preeminence gained by the U.S. after World War II. This book examines the state of research on European foreign correspondence from the United States and on the corps of journalists that produces it. Contributions from both European and American authors examine the varied conceptual issues regarding foreign correspondence, the methodologies that have been employed in studies carried out on both sides of the Atlantic, and the theories that were and could be tested when studying the subject. The book serves as a prolegomena to future studies on foreign correspondence and correspondents.

This book reveals that 'fixers'—local experts on whom foreign correspondents rely—play a much more significant role in international television newsgathering than has been documented or understood. Murrell explores the frames though which international reporting has traditionally been analysed and then shows that fixers, who have largely been dismissed by scholars as 'logistical aides', are in fact central to the day-to-day decision-making that takes place on-the-road. Murrell looks at why and how fixers are selected and what their significance is to foreign correspondence. She asks if fixers help introduce a local perspective into the international news agenda, or if fixers are simply ‘People Like Us’ (PLU). Also included are in-depth case studies of correspondents in Iraq and Indonesia.

Though writers and readers have long agreed that travel does not only broaden the mind, but that it is also useful to report on such an experience, the question of what to report on and how has remained a matter of debate. To think of travel and travel writing as â oeforeign correspondenceâ is to apply, metaphorically, a phrase that has its own complex and overlapping history in journalism, politics, and international culture. The chapters of this volume focus on this notion, seen here as a dual problematic oscillating between the private and the public, whether as letters or other forms of writing sent from abroad. From Mandevilleâ (TM)s notorious Travels to fin de siècle Hispanic writing, this volume offers readings of accounts by early modern and more recent Lithuanian and Polish travellers, representations of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, the Ottoman Empire and India, Quixotic tropes in English travel writing about Spain, Galignaniâ (TM)s newspaper aesthetics, and several contributions on translation issues and the foreign as an idiom to be rendered in more familiar terms. The essays collected here thus all take foreign correspondence as their starting point, whether as letters or in other narrative forms. These texts are involved in complex webs of personal, political, social, and cultural negotiations between travellers and their hosts, as well as their presumed target audience; a key aspect of the rhetorics of foreign correspondence, as the chapters of this volume also go to show.