Demise of the Foreign Correspondent

Even at their best, newspapers are also a limited medium. I have always been acutely aware that no matter how deeply I burrowed into a society or how many people I interviewed, I was only peeling back the most superficial layers of complex, murky worlds in which people routinely lied, every incident had a contradictory version, and no 1,500-word article could possibly do justice to the truth.

Yet newspapers can also fill an important niche between television and academe, offering an accessible way for busy people to learn about distant events and an outlet for writing that captures the essence of a time and place without polemics or pedantry. They can put events in context, explain human behavior and belief, evoke a way of life. Foreign correspondents can burrow into a society, cultivate strangers' trust, follow meandering trails and dig beneath layers of diplomatic spin and government propaganda.

As a young reporter, I devoured the work of famous foreign correspondents and yearned to follow in their footsteps as they chronicled human travails and endeavors: the flight into exile, the search for work, the upheaval of war, the pilgrimage of faith. Joe Lelyveld, accompanying black workers on their daily bus commute into a South African city. Michael Herr, following a psychedelic trail of tears through the jungles of Vietnam. Freya Stark in the 1930s, following the great frankincense road: "On its stream of padding feet the riches of Asia travelled; along its slow continuous thread the Arabian empires rose and fell." Some may call this highbrow tourism, but I agree with the late Polish correspondent Ryszard Kapuscinski: There is something more valuable and more enduring than facts.

The best work that I produced over the years, and that resonated most with readers, were the stories that took the time and space to portray an alien world in detail. The road trip across Afghanistan during Taliban rule, where veiled women told me they finally felt safe from marauding militias. The train ride across India with a family to baptize their son in the Ganges, which they fervently believed would protect him for life. The portrait of a poor Afghan village where tiny children begged me not to destroy the family's opium poppy crop. The trial of the Pakistani man who carved up his wife's face in a jealous rage, and then told me with great satisfaction that he had avenged his family honor.

Although many people have a glamorous image of foreign correspondents, theirs is a lonely, gritty and often dangerous way of life. During my years on the road, I have landed in capitals where I knew no one, all hell was breaking loose and I had 10 hours until deadline. I have lain in sweltering hotel rooms staring at spiders, outrun drunken soldiers waving pistols, interviewed hysterical teenagers who vowed to murder all Americans, inhaled tear gas with angry mobs, gone weeks without a hot meal or shower.

I never regretted a minute of it -- and I never thought I'd be a member of a dying breed. I know that change is inevitable, that fewer people are buying our products and that the news business must adapt or sink. But putting aside my nostalgia for literary nomadism, I am convinced that cutting back on first-hand reporting from abroad and substituting cheaper, simpler forms of overseas news delivery is a false economy and a grave mistake.

Don't we learn more about Islam from Anthony Shadid's wide-ranging Post interviews with thoughtful Muslims in Egypt and Turkey than from images of the latest bombing in Baghdad? Don't we identify more with Sharon LaFraniere's New York Times portraits of village customs in Malawi and Mozambique than with dry reports about the grim toll of AIDS across Africa? If newspapers stop covering the world, I fear we will end up with a microscopic elite reading Foreign Affairs and a numbed nation watching terrorist bombings flash briefly among a barrage of commentary, crawls and celebrity gossip.

Even amid the broader wave of newspaper cutbacks, the announcement that the Globe was shutting down its foreign bureaus hit a special nerve among newspaper journalists. Somehow it seemed a watershed in the inexorable surrender of an honorable craft to the bottom line.

Many of us knew and admired Elizabeth Neuffer, a Globe correspondent who spent several years searching for mass killers in Rwanda and Bosnia, and later published a riveting book about her findings. Elizabeth, who died in a car accident in Iraq in 2003, believed in following the truth to its source, and the paper she worked for gave her the space and resources to do so. Now I fear we are witnessing the demise of the kind of journalism that permitted such quests at all.

constablep@washpost.com

Pamela Constable, a Washington Post staff writer, has reported from more than 35 countries.