Carnegie Reporter, Vol. 3, No. 1 | The International Reporting Project: Giving Journalists A New Perspective On the News, page 2 (low-bandwidth)

But there was another benefit that these thirteen “Gatekeeper Editors”—as the group was collectively known—were reaping, as well: journalism is arguably the most prominent American profession that makes little investment in its best and brightest. According to the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, the business world spends approximately two percent of its payroll on training employees, the technology world about four percent, but journalism, by comparison, invests less than one percent in professional development. To be awarded an IRP Fellowship in International Journalism, an editor must apply and be accepted. His bosses must agree to give him the time off.

All the journalists on this trip, from large and small papers from both coasts and points in between, as well as from radio and television, had similar motivations for applying to participate in the current study tour, which they shared with one another in a small conference room at an airport hotel a few hours before taking off from Washington for Beirut. For more than a year, these editors had been planning, managing, and editing copy focused on the war in Iraq and other conflicts in the Middle East. Since 9/11, there had been little let up for the foreign editors who daily have to assess the needs of their audience, the demands in the newsroom and unrelenting competition.

“I manage nine foreign reporters,” Steve Butler, the Washington foreign editor for the Knight Ridder chain, told the group, “I don’t feel I have the background I need to make informed decisions about their work.” This was an interesting admission from a man who was hardly a neophyte in his profession. Fluent in Chinese, he had lived and reported in Asia for many years but felt less grounded in Middle East issues. He came on this trip hungry for information, insight and knowledge.

“We publish fast and on the fly,” confessed Arlene Getz, a South African who had covered much of the anti-apartheid struggle and the transition to democracy in her home country for Newsweek magazine. Now she is deputy editor of the magazine’s web site and working and living in New York. She, too, wanted a deeper grounding in the Middle East, now the center of so much journalistic attention.

James Smith, a foreign correspondent for 22 years, explained that he manages six correspondents for The Boston Globe and 80 percent of his time is focused on Middle East coverage. He had recently opened the paper’s bureau in Baghdad but said, “ I’m not as familiar as I need to be with the Middle East. I hope that this experience will help me to direct our coverage more knowingly.”

No one was saying it in quite so many words, but in journalese, for these editors, the next two weeks of their lives could be headlined: Crash Course In Arab Public Opinion.

And that was almost exactly the preview they received from Samer Shehata, the Islamic scholar from Georgetown University who gave them an hour lecture on the region they would be visiting before they left the U.S. “During your travels, at meetings you’ll attend, you’ll hear that the war on terrorism is a war on Islam,” Shehata told the group. His talk provided a grounding in ideas that echoed throughout the trip.

John Schidlovsky had organized the IRP program to pack in what he felt every reporter and editor would need to know in order to better cover this part of the world. Schidlovsky had founded the International Reporting Project seven years ago with the backing of the Pew Charitable Trusts, the sole funder before they ceased support so they could direct their resources toward other initiatives. (The International Reporting Project has since received grants from Carnegie Corporation of New York, as well as other foundations.) After many years as a foreign correspondent, he wandered into the world of journalism education through the door of the Freedom Forum, a foundation focused on a free press.

Creating his own international program for journalists was Schidlovsky’s dream. “I was increasingly disappointed that there were fewer news bureaus overseas at many U.S. news operations,” he said, “meaning, not only was the public getting less international news but journalists had few opportunities to cover international news.” He created a semester-long training program for young working journalists drawing on the expertise of Johns Hopkins scholars. Each semester a new crop of fellows—young or mid-career journalists who compete for the fellowships—come for four months of classes and seminars at Johns Hopkins followed by weeks of on-the-ground travel and reporting in a chosen part of the world.

After a few years of working with young and mid-level reporters, Schidlovsky realized that, “We really had to reach their bosses. We learned that many editors in charge of foreign coverage had not been to key countries in the world, yet they were making decisions about how international news was presented.” Thus the Gatekeeper Editors program was launched, a yearly trip designed to give leading editors a crash course in the culture, politics, history, issues and perspectives of a particular region of the world. “As a result of these trips,” says Schidlovsky, “we could eventually have hundreds of participants who assume increasingly important roles in their news organizations. Editors in chief; publishers—people in positions to implement pretty substantial changes and have substantial impact on their business.”

As this particular Gatekeeper trip progressed, it was clear that no news organization could have put together as deep, multi-faceted, varied, or colorful a ten-day experience in Lebanon and Syria as had Schidlovsky and his deputy, Louise Leif. Leif, also a former journalist and veteran of television as well as print, is fluent in Arabic and she had made the arrangements on the ground, which included a meeting with members of Hezbollah, the terrorist group that had become infamous in the 1970s for kidnapping journalists and holding them hostage for months, and which—with an irony lost on none of the journalists on this trip—was now hosting the Gatekeeper Editors at their headquarters. Leif has also arranged for seminars on Arab television, women’s rights, the United Nations, politics, diplomacy and visits to the American embassy, the Hezbollah television station and Beirut’s famous “Green Line,” the now busily traveled main avenue that had been the dividing line between Islam and Christian Beirut during the long Lebanese civil war.

Next page: It was a great deal to absorb. “The evaluation at the end of the trip will help us really understand whether we met the editors’ expectations,” said Leif, “and how, if at all, their experiences will influence the way they handle foreign coverage from this region in the future.

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