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.

An award-winning memoir from the bestselling author of March and Year of Wonders. Born in Sydney's western suburbs in the late 1950s, the young Geraldine Brooks longs to discover the vivid places where she believes history and culture are made. Penfriends from the Middle East, France and America offer her the window she craves on life beyond Australia's isolated backyard. With the aid of their letters, Brooks turns her bedroom into the bridge of the Starship Enterprise, the barricades of Parisian student protests and the swampy fields of an embattled kibbutz. Twenty years later and worlds away from her sheltered girlhood, Brooks is an award-winning foreign correspondent covering war and famine. Still intrigued by the foreign correspondents of her adolescence, she embarks on a human treasure hunt in Israel, France and the US to find them. Brooks discovers men and women whose lives have been shaped by war and hatred, by fame and notoriety, and by the ravages of mental illness. Foreign Correspondence is an intimate, moving and often humorous memoir of growing up in Australia in the 1960s that speaks directly to the heart of everyone who ever yearned to become a citizen 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.

Despite the importance of foreign news, its history, transformation and indeed its future have not been much studied. The scholarly community often calls attention to journalism’s shortcomings covering the world, yet the topic has not been systematically examined across countries or over time. The need to redress this neglect and the desire to assess the impact of new media technologies on the future of journalism – including foreign correspondence – provide the motivation for this stimulating, exciting and thought-provoking book. While the old economic models supporting news have crumbled in the wake of new media technologies, these changes have the potential to bring new and improved ways to inform people of foreign news. In an increasingly globalized era, journalism is being transformed by the effortlessly quick sharing of information across national boundaries. As such, we need to reconsider foreign correspondence and explore where such reporting is headed. This book discusses the current state and future prospects for foreign correspondence across the full range of media platforms, and assesses developments in the reporting of overseas news for audiences, governments and foreign policy in both contemporary and historical settings around the globe. As Emmy Award and Pulitzer Prize-winning correspondent Serge Schmemann reminds us in this book, "quality journalism and unbiased reporting are as valid and necessary today as they ever were [...] one of the primary tasks of journalists and scholars as they follow the changes taking place must be to ensure that the ‘new international information order’ now imposed by the Internet remains true to the ideals and traditions that define our journalism." This book was originally published as a special issue of Journalism Studies.

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.

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?

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.