in the "The End of the Foreign Correspondent?" thread, El Oso »&#8230 [...]

The show participant from Israel mentioned a news aggregation that she checks every day, repeatedly, but didn’t spell it out.

I went looking for it today, and I’m pretty sure that I’m not coming up with it. She prounounced it “Mee-Morandum” every time. Nothing under the spelling “mimorandum.” “Memeorandum” does produce a “memorandum.com.” This is, indeed, a news aggregator. But it’s limited to the USA, limited to politics, and as of right now, has much more hard right content than left (although there’s some stuff from the left, but I had to search to find it).

Somehow, I don’t think that this is what she was talking about. Can any of you point me to the real site?

Thanks.

Richard

I would make some further points:

1) the ‘traditional’ sites he lists are nothing more than low budget, low quality local English language newspapers of which there are many and not many are very good, if we are to judge them by the standards of objectivity, balance and a clear division of opinion and fact (this includes all the UK press incidentally)

2) the IHT, to which I subcribe daily, is by far the best general interest offering out there if you are interested in international news, and it is available in the USA, although its owner the NYT, likes to keep this deliberately quiet so as not to harm sales of the NYT national edition.

The IHT has access to the entire NYT foreign correspondent network (all rivalled by a handful of other newspapers: FAZ in Germany, Le Monde (more emphasis on Africa), the WP, and of course the two business newspapers the FT and the WSJ. The Times of London for example has I think about only 10 full time fully staffed, permanent foreign correspondents last time I checked and I’d bet a dollar that number has decreased, not increased.

In addition the IHT has its own excellent network of foreign correspondents all over the world, including in Washington. Chris is SO out of touch on this newspaper mentioning people like Art Bloody Buchwald, who is DEAD.

John Vinocur is still stirring it up but people like Vicki Shannon (Technology) and James Kanter (European business) are new role models.

Reading the IHT is as close to travelling the world in half an hour than any other media and it hands down beats the NYT or the WP for foreign coverage.

3) Chris also completely failed to understand the point of a foreign correspondent.

It isn’t someone who can be parachuted into an international situation like that dreadful woman who works for CNN International and come up with a blistering yarn (all these people do is recycle the prevailing line among parachuted in correspondents like themselves, stringers, and fixers). A proper foreign correspondent is someone who lives in the country, for several years, and does their reporting not by consulting netvibes every morning Mr. Crampton, but getting out there and hitting the phones and working the streets and their contact books and finding out wha the hell is going on. This is what the NYT folks excel at, as do those of the IHT.

4) Where they differ to bloggers is that, even if they havent lived in the country they report all their lives, they have lived there long enough to know who is who and what the hell is going on. Secondly they have immediate and top level access to any number of senior governement, political, ngo, security and business contacts, as well as a good feel and understanding for the person on the street.

John Vinocur in Paris can pick up the phone and get a personal conversation, off the record, with the French prime minister or president for example, or one of their senior aides. Few, actually I doubt any, French bloggers can.

When are people going to understand that most bloggers are just like you and I, and if you live in the USA how qualified are you to report to the world the news in the USA. Do you have access to the White House, the CIA, the heads of Fortune 100 companies. I seriously doubt it. Hence we like mainstream media foreign correspondents, not forgetting, last but not least, that if they work for a newspaper like the IHT they are objective, trained journalists, who speak the language and who are there to assemble facts, not push their views, and are trained not to mix fact with personal opinion in their reporting.

I think the entire nature of Chris’s debate on this topic was lamentably ill-informed and out of touch, which I have to say is not something I ever much find to be the case.

I’ll conclude by advising anyone to subscribe to the IHT at http://www.iht.com and find out that foreign correspondents are alive and well and in one hell of a lot better health than the current or projected blog scene.

As Crampton did manage to remember to say about his job and his employer, a paper like the IHT is better than spending hours trawling the net because, with the normal reservations anyone would have about any corporate owned institution, you can TRUST it.