Monday, March 26, 2007
How to become a foreign correspondent
Maria Trombly has an enthusiastic start at the SPJ-blog with a second piece, after a first piece on outsourcing journalism. She tells her US audience how to become a foreign correspondent in places like Shanghai. Well, basically the message is a sad one: you cannot. The number of official correspondents is dropping and the freelancers can only survive by making a living as an English teacher. Good overview.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
2 comments:
My message wasn't *all* sad. I think that if someone has skill, connections, and persistence they can find work -- in fact, they can find work anywhere, not just overseas.
Skills and connections, of course, are easy to create. All you have to do is go study, or go meet people. If you're a good journalist, both should be easy.
Persistence is a bit harder to get if you don't already have it. But people are trained to have persistence all the time (in fact, during the first year of any newspaper job, that's the thing that editors will be beating into you all day). So I assume that you can train yourself to be persistent, if you want to.
So, in the end, I believe that becoming a foreign correspondent is very doable, if you're willing to put in the work.
And English teaching should be the *last* resort for anyone, because it doesn't leave you any time to report or write.
Well, to be a foreign English media reporter, newscaster, teacher, corporate trainer & what-have-you, it is not what you can perform that matters in a China that is plagued by racism & paper certificates.
Remember, as I was told, as long as you have white skin & knows English (even if you pronounce crab as carp) that's all that matters to the parents & employers.
It's where you are from, specifically your genes. From where I come from, racism is not tolerated. In China, it is a special priviledge to the extent that a native speaker's fart is worth the weight of Gucci perfumery BUT not that of Yao Ming or Liu Xiang.
So what good if you have skills, connections & persistence when a yellow banana is looked down upon by its same breed.
It is no wonder foreigners are laughing silently to the bank.
Post a Comment