Rick Hall who is the managing editor of the Desert Morning News in Salt Lake City has concerns over subsidizing foreign coverage from the AP when his paper does not use it often. He says, "There's no question [local news] is our franchise, and I heard the same thing from many other editors at APME [conference]."  

He is right that other editors feel the same way. The South Florida Sun-Sentinel has announced the closing of its national/foreign desk in order to focus more on local content. The Boston Globe has recently closed its last three international bureaus and the Baltimore Sun has already closed its bureau in China and will shut down South Africa and Russia by the end of the year.

Despite this trend, the AP has been expanding its foreign bureaus and has developed a new newsgathering model: collaborative journalism across borders, linking news to a larger picture, presented online in a multimedia format.

AP International, established in 2003, now has 243 bureaus in 97 countries. Other organizations such as the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, and Washington Post all have foreign bureaus but do not compare to the strengths of the AP.

The star of the AP foreign bureaus is Iraq with around 200 staffers. However “the picture of what is happening here in Iraq is incomplete,” according to AP correspondent Robert Reid. That, according to him is because there are not enough foreign bureaus in other cities beside Baghdad to paint a complete picture of what is happening.

The AP is trying to close that gap by growing their foreign bureaus and investing millions to improve communication between foreign bureaus to report the most accurate story possible.

Source: American Journalism Review