Spectrum

The concept of using foreign correspondents housed in other countries to help inform the American public of the news is a concept that goes back to Colonial days. Yet today, news organizations have drastically cut back on full-time correspondents abroad opting instead for a smaller reporting corps and the use of free-lancers and citizen journalists. So says long-time journalists and authors John Maxwell Hamilton and Peter Copeland as they discussed the history, present and future of using foreign correspondents to report news to America. Hamilton claims that Colonists re-published the news from newspapers abroad that arrived in the Colonies on ships. He says that the interest in the American public, at that time, was high to learn of news from the homelands of immigrants. Foreign correspondents also were used to convey news in the 19th Century and on through the 20th Century, according to Hamilton. He believes, however, that the pinnacle of the status of the foreign correspondent was between World War I and