Is there reason to be hopeful as an aspiring foreign correspondent?
I think there’s reason to be both hopeful, as a young person who wants to be a foreign correspondent, and concerned, as someone who consumes foreign reporting. There’s been a lot of leveling and, as a consequence, a lot less seasoning. When I graduated from college in 1997, the accepted route to becoming a foreign correspondent was: Go work for a mid-sized metropolitan daily like the Raleigh News and Observer, do well enough there to get a job at someplace with foreign bureaus, like the Washington Post, but you had to start off covering cops for them, and then graduate to a more high-profile beat, get on the front page, kiss up to your bosses and then maybe you’d eventually get rewarded with a foreign posting. If everything went exactly right, you could have a desk and an apartment in Frankfurt in, say, 15 years. Today, the Frankfurt bureau is probably closed, the Washington Post isn’t hiring, and midsized dailies are going out of business — the old path is gone, probably forever. But