KEVIN KLOSE: I feel very lucky to be here as a moderator, because at NPR our situation is somewhat different from a lot of the daily newspapers. We treat international news extremely importantly; we think it's crucial to our audience.

You will see in those tables [in the Pew Research Center study] on across-the-board listenership to national television news, evening news, cable news, you name it, in '93 the numbers are quite high, and in '02 the numbers are low. There are only two streams where there is more participation by other listeners or users or audience: One is the Internet, which didn't exist in '93, when they started measuring; and the other is National Public Radio. Part of the reason the dynamic for us is so powerful is because we treat international news very seriously.

At NPR, we have now 11 foreign bureaus. That is more than three times the number of foreign bureaus that CBS News, once the Tiffany of American broadcast journalism, now has.

These [Pew] studies offer fascinating and important insights into the state of American daily newspapering at the beginning of a complex new century, when every American community and its local papers will be challenged in extraordinary ways by unpredictable, dangerous events, dangerous perhaps to the physical well-being of individual citizens and perhaps of whole communities and the regions beyond them.

These surveys, as you will see throughout this important conference, hold the key to the challenges, the potentials, and the remarkably disturbing and seemingly counterproductive contradictions of daily newspapering.

The studies penetrate to the core of a series of issues that every publisher of a daily paper and every managing editor, editor, and local editor face and are struggling to comprehend.

The charts and graphs of these studies show a huge potential for daily newspapers to serve their readers and build a truly special relationship with their communities through foreign news coverage.

If American newspaper editors and their publishers motor quickly past the insights and the clear path markers in these studies, we will all be the poorer for it. At National Public Radio, foreign news, as I said, has always been and always will be a major commitment.

Andrew Kohut, director of the Pew Research Center, says the public feels it lacks the background to follow foreign news.

ANDREW KOHUT: This is the sixth survey in a dozen years that we've conducted that measures in considerable detail the American public's news habits. We had very high expectations for this one. Clearly, after September 11, the American public was using the media, the news media in all their forms, at record levels. The questions we asked in our polls found many Americans saying they were going to be better citizens; they were going to be more interested in international news. They were more interested and they were going to follow more closely. But nine months after the attack, our expectations were pretty much dashed.

There's little indication that the news interests and habits of the American public are much different than they were in the year 2000. Reported levels of reading, watching, and listening are just about where they were when we conducted our last survey.

I think the bottom line in this poll is that the powerful generational factors that have been dictating audience trends over the course of the last decade have proved to be stronger influences than the American public's reaction to the attacks on its attitudes and its behavior.

At best, this poll finds a slightly higher percentage of the public saying they're following international news very closely, from 14 to 21 percent. Interest in national news is up a comparable nudge, but, as in the past, most people--two-thirds--said they follow international news only when something is happening. Thirty-seven percent say they follow regularly, but only half of those people say they follow closely. So we're talking about a relatively small group of people who represent the core audience for international news.

Clearly, there continues to be strong interest in the war on terrorism, and both at home and abroad half of the public is paying very close attention to homeland defense, to our continued military efforts in Afghanistan and elsewhere. And public interest in the war on terrorism has extended to the Mideast.

We've had in recent surveys 40 percent saying they paid very close attention to news about the Mideast. That is double the many, many surveys that we've conducted over the years measuring interest in events occurring in the Mideast. I'll give you one perspective: on the weekend of the Oslo accord. Only 11 percent were paying close attention many years ago to that accord. Now, we get about 40 percent. So it's a fourfold increase. But there's absolutely no evidence that the public's appetite for international news has extended much beyond terrorism in the Mideast and things that are directly related to these issues. Just six percent paid attention to news about the coup, the aborted coup, in Venezuela, which was happening during the time of this interview. Six percent followed the surprising showing of Le Pen in the French elections in the first round.

Clearly, the American public, much like during the Cold War, has a new prism through which to judge the importance of international news. And based upon the results of this poll, it's good that they have something to hang onto. The poll offers rather powerful evidence that increased attentiveness to international news is most inhibited by a lack of background and information related to these news stories.

Consider the following: First, all of the increase, almost all of the increase, from 14 to 21 percent has occurred among groups of people who have traditionally been part of the core audience: highly educated, affluent, older. Younger, less-well-educated people, poorer people, are not significantly more interested in international news.

Secondly, when we ask people why they don't follow international news stories more closely, two-thirds say it's because they don't have the background. The old refrain of "what's it to me?" comes in a distinct third. It's rather hollow to say these days, "What does it matter to me what's going on in the world?" That's clearly not an answer that can stand the test of these times.

But the public is struggling. People who don't have a background in international affairs, particularly people who haven't attended college, have a lot of trouble with international news, and that's what they tell us. On average, in the day before the interview this time, respondents spent about 15 minutes less [following international news] than respondents told us they spent back in 1993. There are no signs in the new polling that the news interests and habits of young adults -- those under 35 --have been transformed by September 11. They continue to register much lower levels of news interest than people in previous generations at that stage in their life cycle. And more important perhaps is the fact that younger baby boomers have not developed stronger news habits as they've aged.

But you have to keep in mind that, given the fragmentation of modern news audiences, serious news outlets can benefit from even just a modest increase in interest in international news.

While only about one in six Americans, by our reckoning, are strongly committed to foreign news, they make up a disproportionate share of audience for outlets such as NPR and "NewsHour."

I think for the "NewsHour" that 44 percent of the audience is made up of core international news citizens. Similar statistics are found for the audiences of political and literary magazines.

And the international news audience is even important to broader serious news programs, such as evening network news and cable news. I think that's why 95 percent of Dwight's respondent editors said that they sense more interest in international news. I think they're reflecting more intense interests from their constituents, and I think they're hearing from the choir.

	More than half of the newspaper editors surveyed feel that their papers are doing a fair to poor job of covering foreign news, says Dwight Morris, right.

DWIGHT L. MORRIS: This is definitely a good news/bad news, bottle half empty/bottle half full kind of survey. As Andy said, it's quite possible that some of what we were being told by the editors was in response to their hearing from a highly motivated group of citizens who intensely care about international news.

But let me just walk you through a few things that highlight just how bad things are.

We interviewed 65 percent of the editors, international news editors and wire editors, at newspapers with circulations of 30,000 or more in this country. These are not people for the most part who'd been on the job for six months. They have a long tenure as the international news editor or a wire editor at their paper.

Having said that, nearly two-thirds of them -- 64 percent --felt that the job that the media are doing in this country covering international news is either fair or poor. I mean, they look around at what they see not only in their own newspapers but what they see in the media across the country, and they don't like it particularly well. Seventy-four percent of those representing papers with a circulation of at least 100,000 -- that's three-quarters of the people at the largest newspapers --rated it as fair or poor, compared with just 58 percent of those at smaller papers.

Now, while five percent rated the media's coverage as excellent, 10 percent rated it as poor. Twice as many rated it poor as excellent.

But when we asked them to rate how the media handle other types of news, it brings into focus this rather negative perception of their own job. Sports: 95 percent of the editors we interviewed thought the national news media were doing a good job or an excellent job of providing sports news; 82 percent, good or excellent job of providing national news coverage; 78 percent, excellent or good on local; 51 percent, excellent or good on business news.

Of the five areas we talked about, international news was at rock bottom. And these are the people who are supposedly the most interested in the subject. They didn't just talk negatively about the media in the global sense of the word; they talked negatively about their own publications as well. More than half--around 56 percent-- rated their own newspaper as doing either a fair or poor job of covering international news. Six times as many--12 percent versus two percent--rated it poor as opposed to excellent. Only two percent said that their own newspaper was doing an excellent job.

Two-thirds of the editors look at television news and they say, all right, well, we're doing a bad job, but, you know, TV is doing even worse. Now, maybe that makes us feel better. I don't know. But two-thirds of the editors view the network television coverage negatively. That's including 22 percent who think that the networks are doing a poor job. Cable news fared somewhat better, but again 40 percent of the foreign editors at these papers described their coverage as either fair or poor.

Now, we asked these folks, all right, why do you think you're doing a bad job? How much of your daily news hole do you actually devote to this? Maybe part of the explanation for why you think you're doing a poor job is that you don't really devote that much news space to it. And that's certainly true. Seventy-three percent of the editors we spoke with said that their publications devote 10 percent or less of their daily news hole to the coverage of international events.

It's not surprising, when you look at those numbers, that Andy found that the biggest problem that people have with following international news is that they have no background. You can't put a lot of background into the paper when you're devoting five percent of your news hole to the coverage of a subject. You don't have a lot of space to explain much to readers.

They did see an increased desire for international news. Ninety-five percent of them said that post-September 11 there had been an increase in the appetite for that kind of news. And nearly four out of 10 of them said that they had heard specifically from readers that they wanted more international news coverage in the paper. So they tried to meet it.

Two-thirds of the editors said that their international news coverage would probably fade to pre-9/11 levels in the not-too-distant future. Some were telling us that it already had, even with the problems in the Middle East.

Editors representing newspapers with circulations of 100,000 or more, about a third of them, were slightly more likely than their counterparts at smaller newspapers to view the change as permanent.

Most foreign editors anticipate the interest will wane because they believe readers are significantly less interested in international news than in other types of news.

International news scored fourth of the five in terms of perceived reader interest. You're not going to devote a huge amount of news hole to something that you don't think your readers are interested in. And that is certainly part of the bad news, because I think they're missing an opportunity. Again, you have an opportunity to perhaps expand the reader base of international news by devoting enough space to actually explain the situation to people, so that they can understand it and get interested in it.

If you decide from the beginning that they're not interested and therefore you're not going to cover it, it's a self-fulfilling prophecy. Nearly nine out of 10, 88 percent of the editors, who had seen the news hole increase said that all or most of their coverage had been devoted to the war on terrorism.

Getting to Andy's point about the fact that we'd given the readers something to grab on to, or the readers had suggested to us perhaps that they needed something to grab on to: Here this big event happened, and so we poured all of our energy into covering this story, not necessarily something that we should not have covered, but perhaps the other stories that Andy mentioned [coup in Venezuela, French elections] were not covered as extensively in the local papers as the war on terrorism. And that could partially explain why people didn't follow them. It's hard to follow something if you're in Burlington, Vermont, or in Peoria, Illinois, and the paper doesn't print anything about it. And I've been in both of those places, and I can tell you that they don't.

Nearly six out of 10 reported that coverage, as I said, was going to gradually return to pre-September 11 levels, and they were going to return there primarily because of cost. A news hole is expensive; we don't have enough of it. If we have to make decisions based upon someone's being interested in "X" versus "Y" and we have a limited news hole, we're going to go with the one they're most interested in; it costs too much to expand that newspaper.

Editors are beginning to see, or I should say they have recognized in large part, that there are connections within their own communities to the international world. We're becoming one world. And they see those connections; they see that foreign companies invest in their localities; they see that businesses in their communities invest overseas; they see that there are large proportions of their populations that come from other countries, either recently or at some time in the past.

They can recognize that these linkages exist. Two-thirds of the editors, 67 percent said that they provide regular or fairly frequent coverage of ethnic and immigrant groups in their communities. And that's a pretty good piece of news, depending upon how they define regular or fairly frequent, I suppose. Sixty-one percent of the editors indicated that at least some of the reporters in their newsroom are able to conduct interviews in the native language of these recent immigrants.

Nevertheless, two-thirds of the editors rated their coverage of the issues important to these ethnic and immigrant groups as either fair or poor; just four percent rated their coverage as excellent. So they recognize they're out there. They report on them, in their own words, either regularly or fairly frequently, but they also don't think they do a very good job of it.

Ninety-six percent of the editors report that businesses in their communities have overseas investments, but nearly half of the editors--46 percent--say they rarely or ever publish stories about those foreign investments in their papers. And it's not just the international editors; the paper doesn't do it; nobody at the paper does it.

Twenty-seven percent of the editors said they send reporters overseas to cover local stories or global stories with a local angle at least occasionally. And those who don't cited cost as the reason. Again, there's an opportunity to spend resources, and this is something that I constantly deal with myself. There's a limited budget. And what's that limited budget going to be spent on? Are we going to spend $35,000 to put somebody on a plane to fly across the country to watch the President give a speech and attend a fund-raiser, or are we going to spend $35,000 to put somebody on a plane to send them to the Middle East to cover a story? And I think everybody in this room knows the answer to that question.

"Foreign news goes well beyond the war on terror," says Robert Rivard, editor of the San Antonio Express-News.

ROBERT RIVARD: Let me say at the outset that I don't recognize myself in this research. I don't want to be that editor that's profiled in there, and I hope no one at my paper has that mindset either, because that isn't the way we're operating in San Antonio.

In fact, if I can just spin this a little bit more optimistically before I get into our theme, I don't read 10 or 15 papers a day, but I look at that many over the course of a week, because of the Internet.

And I think we should start by starting at the top. For The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, The Wall Street Journal; down a level, Chicago Tribune, Boston Globe--this has been their finest hour, in my view. The papers have never been better. They've done an extraordinary job, and because the Internet is out there, all of them have much more of a national profile than they've ever had. Because of the way information moves now, papers the size of mine have access in the same news cycle to the best journalism that all of these newspapers produce, and I don't have a hard time publishing foreign news or compelling national news. My editors have a hard time finding out what from the very best that all these other larger papers are doing we can put in to augment what we're doing locally.

So I think when you start at the top, American newspapers have never been better. And you're seeing that in readership results for those papers. When you go down to the next level, or down a level or two, when you get to the regional papers, which would define the San Antonio Express-News, I think that it depends on the individual paper.

My own view is 9/11 created the responsibility of a lifetime for American newspaper editors, and, indeed, for all of us who still consider journalism a calling and not a business. It injected new life and energy into the importance of what we do in society, in a democracy, and if it didn't galvanize your newsroom and raise the morale and the sense of purpose, then something is amiss in your newsroom, in my view. It certainly did in ours. I don't think that's waned.

The intensity of 9/11 obviously is not as intense nine months later, but the sense of purpose is very much there, the sense of a continuing story that has no foreseeable end is there, and the inclination to constantly think outside the box about how we can better bring that to people is still there.

You can look at the United States as an insular, xenophobic, largely monolingual society. Or you can look at it and see what the census numbers are showing us, that one of the most important population shifts, demographic shifts, is under way across the country. And for people in cities like Miami or San Antonio or Los Angeles, or anywhere in the South-west, and even farther up North, the explosion in the Latino population, which is both immigrant-driven and multigenerational-driven, is an extraordinary story and one that makes our world a smaller world, and depending upon how you define foreign news, makes foreign news all that more important.

And foreign news, let's remember, goes well beyond the war on terror. In my neck of the country, we're looking at whether or not Pope John Paul II is actually, in his state of health, going to get on a plane a month from now and come to, first, Canada, and then Mexico to make Juan Diego a saint, and then on to Guatemala. This is where he started his foreign papacy almost 25 years ago, after he visited Poland--Mexico. And so a paper my size will probably have anywhere from six to 10 people in Mexico and Guatemala to cover that, if he's there--a very important story to our city, particularly our very large majority Hispanic Roman Catholic population.

We couldn't cover the war on terror like the big newspapers, but we were there. Hearst put together a team of about 10 to 15 reporters and photographers that went over to Central Asia. So a paper my size had a team at one point, while we were in Pakistan waiting for events in Afghanistan to unfold, that spent a week in the Kashmir. That was front-page news and a very good package and I think a very prescient piece. And I think our readers very much cared about that.

Throughout the next several months we devoted multiple pages to the war on terror, as I think most major American papers did at the time. Although we don't have that size news hole now, we do have a larger news hole than we did before 9/11. And I think editors are determined to maintain that news hole.

If you are going to be an editor in today's newspaper world, you have to be something of both a diplomat and a fighter. You have to not only be a journalist, but you have to have a fluency in the language of the business side, and you have to be a good negotiator. We came to this calling because we're people of words, but, in fact, the wars for good newspaper budgets are fought over spreadsheets and numbers. And so you have to be willing to stand up to the business side at your newspaper or at your company.

And that doesn't mean you have to be willing to go to war with them, because you won't last very long. But you do have to be strong and you've got to be able to articulate the public trust argument, and never has there been a better time to do that than now.

So I don't know where the five-percent figure [four in 10 papers devote five percent or less of their news hole to international coverage] comes from. I would look at it in a more realistic way and say, What percentage of your front-section news hole is dedicated to foreign news? To me that would be the important measurement. And I would say right now we're probably running about 50/50 with national and regional news in our lead section.

A good deal of that recently has been the Middle East. I don't know how many times the Middle East story has led the Express-News in the last two to three months, but it's certainly on the order of perhaps 20 or 30 times, even in a regional paper. We're not The New York Times, which has sometimes three, four, five foreign stories or stories out of Washington on the front page. But we're always going to have compelling foreign news on the front page, with very rare exceptions. And when it's the most compelling news story today, then it will lead. When all things are equal, probably the best local story will lead, because that's our core competency. But often times foreign news is going to lead the paper, and I think there is a large market there.

We didn't know very much at all about Islam before 9/11. Newspapers didn't do a very good job of telling you about Islam, either out there in the world or out there in the community. I think we're doing a much better job of that, and I think we're doing a much better job of trying to decode this rage against America that is out there in so many places.

I think there's an appetite for really good foreign stories, and not just in the major newspapers or on NPR. Regional newspapers or television programs that invest the time and energy in them are going to find that their readers and their viewers respond positively.

One of the things that we can do is send one less person to the U.S. Open. Or who really needs to see game four of the NBA playoffs and watch Shaq do his thing again? Of course, we'll be there, but, in all seriousness, we put far too much emphasis on popular culture and sports and how we spend our money.

Newsrooms are like any other organization or bureaucracy: They're set up a certain way, and it's easiest to just let them run the way they've been running. But you can move resources and money around, and really, why do we need to have one more person following Tiger Woods around Long Island, when for the same amount of money that you'll spend on the U.S. Open and the British Open and the NBA playoffs, you can send a reporter overseas for two weeks and get a much bigger bang for your buck.

I live in one of the most military cities in the United States. We just went from five military bases down to four. We lost Kelley Air Force Base, but we still have three Air Force bases, and we have an Army base, and so we have an enormous retired military population. They're very worldly in their own way. They've all been abroad on assignments, or most of them have. They care about places where they've worked; they care very much about men and women in uniform that are overseas. So right now foreign news has to include where U.S. interests are or U.S. service people are serving.

I have one full-time military affairs writer and that beat traditionally covered the local military. We had to change that, and had been changing it before 9/11, to the point where we really have one person covering the local military and one person who's leaving San Antonio to write about the military for our local military-minded audience.

My military affairs writer has been everywhere since 9/11. From Afghanistan, he was doing food drops. He's been all through military installations in Europe to write about security measures that were being taken over there, because the feeling was that U.S. installations abroad were perhaps more vulnerable than domestic targets. And he's been on a submarine and an aircraft carrier. We're just doing all sorts of interesting things with him. We're spending a lot more money on him.

I want to just talk about readers for a minute. I was struck that in the poll only 61 percent of the people can name the Vice President. And I thought to myself, Is anybody watching "Saturday Night Live"? How can you not know all the cave jokes?

I think sometimes editors look out there over society and say, 50 percent were reading the paper in this age group a decade ago, and now it's 30 percent; people can't name Cheney, much less Mullah Omar. What's the use? We're all going to die anyway. I think that's the wrong way to look at things. I think the way to look at things is to say we've never been more important, and you can either lead your communities, or you can follow them. And if you lead your communities, you can say it might only be a 25-percent audience that cares intensely about international news, but they're incredibly important readers, they're opinion makers in your community, and the intensity of their connection to you is at the highest. And so now is the time to reaffirm that connection and to build it and deepen it.

E-mail, which is both the best and worst invention of man in the last hundred years, is a very effective way, I think, of keeping your pulse on your most intense readers. I've found they're very, very interested in foreign news. San Antonio is one of many communities that you've all read about that has gone through a very vigorous public exchange with its Jewish community. We did not have circulation boycotts, cancellations, that sort of thing, but we did have our relatively small but very, very visible Jewish leadership engaging the paper very actively; they wanted to know why we do not have a Middle East bureau. Now, that's quite a challenge for a paper my size. We joke that we have three foreign bureaus: one in Mexico City and two on the Texas border. But we have one reporter and photographer in Mexico. We have a couple of reporters and photographers that live on the border, and everybody else travels. Our story is North-South. We've been in Colombia; we've been in Venezuela this year; we've been in Cuba. Who knows where else we'll go? Right now the big story is not North-South; it's the war on terrorism. And we've done what we could within our means and as part of Hearst and a larger team. But when people in a city like San Antonio, which is two hours from the Mexico border, are calling on you to open a Middle East bureau, that's an amazing phenomenon. It means there is not only a passion for that foreign news, but there's an expectation that the only people that can deliver it to them in a reliable and balanced and well-packaged way is the newspaper. We haven't opened a bureau in the Middle East and we're not going to, but will we send people there? Yes, we have, and yes, we will again.

So I guess I'm going to say, in conclusion, that I'm an optimist. I think the newspaper game is a full-contact sport more than ever, and you shouldn't be in it unless you're willing to get some bumps and bruises and also to hand some out.

I remember what I thought were the stories of my generation as a young reporter. I hadn't thought that the story of my generation as an editor had come along, but I knew on 9/11, as I think most editors did, that indeed the story was here, and it was horrible, it was enormous, and it was incalculable, and where it went none of us would know.

	Kevin Klose asks panel members a question about foreign news coverage.

Question

ADAM POWELL III: I'm recently returned to television as general manager of Howard University Television.

We know that when we air conferences like this, which we will one afternoon soon, we're not going to get 30 share. But we also know that at 7 o'clock every night we go well into double digits carrying the BBC off the satellite, and that's the same time that the "News-Hour" is being carried on [the local TV channel], it's the same time that "All Things Considered" is on radio. The "NewsHour" is also on radio at 7 o'clock.

I'd like to probe what Andy called the choir, if we can get a better sense of how big that choir might be, whether self-described or otherwise. Because at least the Nielson data suggest --and these are three-month-old data, not September data -- that BBC does very, very well, well into double digits, at least in this market, not including the replay at 11 o'clock in Maryland.

ANDREW KOHUT: Well, Adam, if you apply the 21 percent to a couple of hundred million people, you're talking about a base of 40 million. And obviously when you're breaking news, or even news that's not "A" news but let's say "B+" news, that 42 million expands, and you're talking about a very important slice of the American population. That's a relatively big number; it's not 200 million, however.

DWIGHT L. MORRIS: It's not evenly spread, either. In another incarnation in my life I did a lot of research for Gannett newspapers, and in the San Francisco Bay area you had extreme interest in international news, at the 61- or 62-percent level. In the Midwest or in more rural Pennsylvania, for instance, it would be down in the 20's. So you have pockets of interest, and certainly you're in one.

This market is obviously highly interested in [foreign news]. I watch the BBC -- I'm one of your viewers -- so there's a real intense interest that goes beyond anything that a normal national survey can measure in pockets.

If you had a big enough universe where you could look at just the top 10 cities, my guess is that you would see the interest even higher. At those 100,000-plus circulation papers, they were significantly more inclined to think that the reader interest and their own news hole allocation would remain at the post-September 11 levels, rather than the pre-September 11 levels.

ROBERT RIVARD: I'm the NPR junkie -- I mean, if it's time to confess what we're listening to at 6 or 7 o'clock at night. I think that there's an enormous amount of interest among that group, and I'm glad to hear those numbers. When you get out of percentages, you start to talk about how big they are.

We hear too many times how many TV sets are on for the Super Bowl or on for this or on for that. We do think about audience all the time as a ratings win or loss. I think we need to think much more in terms of serving core constituencies that are out there, that have high expectations, and that grow according to the quality of the service and information that you're giving them.

Question

LYNN JOINER (director, SAIS-Novartis Prize): I'm wondering if you studied things like MTV or how many hits these different newspapers and web magazines are getting as part of this picture that you're giving us, or whether that's a future study. Also I would guess that, given everybody in this audience, you're preaching to the choir. How do we get the other parts of general society and the journalism world-not just the newspaper side or the radio side-into a room like this to really talk about what are the responsibilities in this new information age?

ANDREW KOHUT: And all of the research that we've done about the Internet, let alone MTV, suggests that Internet use, reading the news on the Internet, is less of a factor, holding constant the demography of the Inter-net audience, in how much people know, how engaged they are in issues, than reading a newspaper or using a traditional form of media. So it's a good idea, but it hasn't worked so far.

Question

PATRICIA ELLIS: I am the executive director of the Women's Foreign Policy Group. I covered foreign affairs for many years for MacNeil/Lehrer and we were always, even at an organization like that, working on getting the public engaged and finding ways to connect foreign affairs to John Q. Citizen.

My issue here is the local angle on international stories. I think that that is a major way to get people engaged. There are local angles throughout the country; they will vary from region to region, city to city, state to state. What I would like to ask the panel to address is the definition of foreign news, because I see a lot of so-called foreign stories on the business page, on the metro page. Are those not examples of foreign news, and should we not be perhaps rethinking the concept of foreign news? Foreign news is not just news out there, but foreign news is news happening here, things going on at the U.N., things going on in your community, at the border.

DWIGHT L. MORRIS: We asked the news editors specifically for their definition of international news, and to a large degree they had a fairly restrictive view--certainly in your terms--of what that is. I mean, almost to a one, they would use phrases like "news emanating from outside the borders of the United States."

If that's how you perceive the world, it's unlikely that you're going to spend valuable resources to send someone overseas to cover a local angle of an international story, because it's not something that you normally think of. And it's not as though these folks don't have access to lots of international news. I mean, 98 percent say their papers subscribe to AP; 64 percent get Knight Ridder; 61 percent get The Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post; 51 percent The New York Times.

ROBERT RIVARD: I think the questioner brings up a really good point.

Two months ago, Levi Strauss out of San Francisco announced that within a couple of months they would no longer make a pair of blue jeans anywhere in the United States of America, and that the last ten thousand or so jobs involved in that sort of semi-skilled labor were all in San Antonio or South Texas. It's just an inevitable chapter of globalism: You're not going to have unskilled labor assembling goods in the United States of America anymore, anywhere, and the remnant jobs that are still around are just that, remnant jobs. And it's just a matter of when, not if, they go away.

So that's a foreign story for us, because, first of all, there's enormous local economic impact that we'll try to tell a human-dimension story about, not just a business-front story. But it's also important to pick up the scent, the trail, and go find out where those jobs went, and tell people in your community, including, I might add, [the group] we talked before, that socioeconomic sector of the community that is too poor to care about international news. I think, in fact, that if you can make the news relate to them, they'll care very much about it. And that would be an example right there. Hourly wage workers who are out of their jobs, who don't understand what's happening around the world, they don't know what NAFTA or free trade means. But they do know what losing a job is, and they're interested in reading about why you can make those blue jeans in Costa Rica or Malaysia and not in the United States anymore. So that's foreign news to me, and a story that will reach a lot of nontraditional readers.

Question

ARTHUR GREEN: I'm a retired State Department Foreign Service information officer. I conduct diplomacy workshops at the Voice of America Training Center.

You mentioned the question of monitoring [your coverage of] the Middle East by elements of the San Antonio community. What has been your experience with members of the Arab-American and American-Jewish communities, where they pointed out, let's say, omissions or problems of coverage? How have you reacted specifically to that?

ROBERT RIVARD: Well, the worst thing you can do in a newsroom or as a newsroom leader is be defensive toward the public. There are a lot of strong feelings out there right now, and you need to have an open door and be prepared to listen to people and deal with them. Arab-Americans think this everywhere, I think. They never got covered before and now they're getting covered a little. It's better, but it's not where they want it to be.

So when you're dealing with people perhaps on how you're doing with the Palestinian- Israeli story, you're going to hear comments that are going to be strong from both sides. You need to listen to them; you need to take them into account and not be defensive, but you need to do what you think is fair and right.

During the couple of months after 9/11, the most popular pages we did were what we call in our newsroom "National Geographic pages," which are full-page info graphics, and they would be, say, "Understanding Islam," or "Under-standing Pakistan." The sort of audience you're trying to reach is, you want teachers to tear those pages out and hang them up in classrooms. Visual graphics help people understand a complex situation in small, simple, dig-estible pieces, and those were clearly the most popular things we did.

Question

MUSTAFA MALIK: I have covered news events in Europe and in the third world. One point I have: I think [American journalists] follow the flag much more than journalists elsewhere.

ROBERT RIVARD: I don't think we take a home-team approach. There are a lot of Americans right now that want you to take a home-team approach. That's just as evident in the debate that's occurring, from editorial pages to talk radio, over whether it's patriotic or unpatriotic to question the administration, and whether mistakes were made, and that sort of thing. I know we're American in our perspective, but I hope we're independent in our reporting. That's a balance you just strive to hit every day, with success some days and not so much others.

ANDREW KOHUT: We have done a number of surveys that show broad support for censorship during the war, but the American public does not want patriotic news. When we asked whether they want news that represents only an American point of view or the point of view of the enemy, two-thirds say both sides.

DWIGHT L. MORRIS: I think it's hard for editors to think outside the box in terms of international news, because 69 percent of them don't speak a foreign language. These are the foreign news editors, and 69 percent of them don't speak a foreign language; 72 percent of them have never lived abroad or worked abroad. It's hard to be thinking about or understanding the world, in a world context, when you have really no experience with that world.

Question

DON OBERDORFER: I used to be one of Kevin's colleagues at The Washington Post. Now I'm a professor at SAIS. Things aren't quite as bleak as your surveys suggest. In the first place, the editors who said that international news is what comes from abroad: We're in a new era now in which the ambiguity in what is international and what is national is very great.

When the President speaks about homeland security; when the FBI fights with the CIA, or there's a perception that they are doing so over the war on terrorism; when a guy is arrested in Chicago who's come from overseas and they claim he's trying to make a dirty bomb; when sources are in Pakistan and the news is here, is it international news, is it national news, what is it? It's something which obviously has the attention of what the political scientists used to call the attentive public. The public is listening to this. And I think if we just carve it out here and say that if the news isn't coming from overseas then it's not international, we're misleading ourselves.

I think this survey suggests that if you take it narrowly, it hasn't changed much. But I cannot believe that the interests of the American public haven't changed a great deal since September 11, and that that won't continue, even if, hopefully, we're spared some other spectacular event on the scale of the 11th of September.

ANDREW KOHUT: I can't disagree with that. I think that, looking at the percentage of people who present a potential audience for international news, there has been a sizeable increase. But there just hasn't been a penetration that's gone beyond and into sectors of the public that have a great deal of trouble following the stories that are not on Topic A.

People say, the reason I don't follow [international news] is because I don't have the background. When we asked these same people what kinds of international news they wanted to follow or watch or read about, background was rated very low. So it's a catch-22. I'm sure it's great for schools and for educational audiences, but there's a limit to how much education you can do on the spot and be effective with your core audience.

KEVIN KLOSE: I think what Robert Rivard has told us is that what they do at the paper is very powerful; they recognize they can't get all these places at once, but they have a sense of their commitment to the values of their community. And while people may not value a backgrounder, the paper is going to put it out there anyway, because it's important to some part of the readership that they might or might not identify. It's going to be hanging, hopefully, he said, in a classroom somewhere. That's going to be there for weeks or a month, and some kid is going to digest it and start to think about it.