For younger journalists entering the profession today, it is hard to imagine how foreign reporting once worked. News organizations now require hostile-environment training, flak jackets, GPS trackers, evacuation plans and liability sign-offs before a correspondent crosses a border. Insurance companies insist on detailed risk assessments. Editors monitor reporters’ movements in real time through dashboards and security briefings.
And yet, even as safety protocols have multiplied, the institutions that once sustained foreign reporting are quietly disappearing. Recent layoffs at The Washington Post, including the closure of its remaining foreign bureaux, mark another step in a long retreat. It is now possible to be better protected than ever and still have nowhere left to report from.
The death this year of Sir Mark Tully, aged 90, marks the passing of a generation that practised foreign correspondence very differently. From the 1960s into the early 2000s, reporting abroad relied less on institutional protection than on judgement, trust and improvization, and on an unspoken understanding that if something went wrong, you were largely on your own.
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