David Greising on foreign correspondents

David Greising talks about being a foreign correspondent for the Chicago Tribune. Economic worries and the future of the profession are foremost in his mind. Greising’s piece is one of three taking the temperature of the people who work for the Tribune,

“Nobody really knows what the fun-damental economics are going to look like going forward,” Greising said, “and those of us who have the privilege of going out and doing stories like [the Amazon rain forest story] will go on trying to do them. Before, if I went on a trip like that I’d just go. Now there’s a little more vetting. But if you can make the argument for the story, and if the economics aren’t going to kill the newspaper, they’ll go for it. We don’t know if it will last forever.”… it strikes me that if print journalism is going to survive, it has to produce unique content. Is the Congo ever going to be relevant to our readers? I don’t know. That’s a higher-level question. The Amazon stuff didn’t get a lot of e-mail response. But if that becomes the yardstick, you’ll see a lot of stories about traffic accidents and fires on the front page. link