Networks and the Future of Foreign Affairs Reporting

The future of foreign reporting is affected by more than the economic crisis gripping the Western news industry, though that too is important. We argue that overseas bureaus and foreign correspondents are tied to a particular morphology of global governance, one rooted in a system of nation-states. The nation-state is the product of a particular information technology that emerged in the eighteenth century, flourished in the twentieth, and is undergoing significant change in the twenty-first. The nation-state emerged from the convergence of a new system of production and a new information technology: newspapers and books. Historically, foreign corresponding has been constituted by a mostly symbiotic relationship among institutions of nation-states and media institutions. Drawing on recent international relations theory, we argue that a second sort of imagined community has emerged. It is organized according to non-spatial relationships among nodes in electronically enabled networks and is characterized by information abundance. Conversely, traditional foreign corresponding is characterized by the central spatial nature of its purpose (foreign corresponding) and by the norms and routines that have defined its relation to hierarchically organized state bureaucracies. We offer three case studies to illustrate our argument.