THE HISTORY OF A SURVIVING SPECIES

Abstract

In 1925, University of Chicago sociologist Robert Park published a seminal essay on “The Natural History of the Newspaper.” That history, he wrote, “is the history of the surviving species. It is an account of the conditions under which the existing newspaper has grown up and taken form.” The reporting of foreign events in American news media has its own natural history. Commercialization and changing forms of ownership, the emergence of new media, developments in technology, evolving norms of professionalism, the shifting panorama of world affairs—these and other factors have forced continual changes in the collection and distribution of foreign news. In this essay, the authors consider these dynamic factors in identifying clearly defined periods in this evolution and demonstrating how this historical framework helps us understand the new and highly complex era of foreign newsgathering we are now in.