The future of the foreign correspondents Clubs

Yesterday, during the weekly journo-drinks at the Cotton Club, one of the newcomers brought up the subject of the future of the foreign correspondents Clubs. Well, that was a nice subject.
Both Maria Trombly and me have very outspoken ideas about that, so we gladly delivered our two cents.
The classic foreign correspondents as we knew them from last century are gone or on the way out. That is for me already an old story.
While cities like Hong Kong and Tokyo still have prestigious places where foreign correspondents used to go to, most correspondents have fled those cities. Since most journalists cannot afford the high fees (and certainly do not get them reimbursed anymore from their bosses), its mostly bankers and other business people who keep those clubs running.
When we set up the Shanghai Foreign Correspondents Club at the beginning of this century, we realized that membership fees for journalists would have been low, otherwise there would be no club at all. The new style foreign correspondent has little money and hardly any time for those clubs.
According to Maria Trombly the word fee in the US for journalists was in the 1950s one US dollar and that fee has not gone up since: the average word fee is still one US dollar. Well, local tariffs in Shanghai are down to one Renminbi per word, about ten percent of that fee. Experienced journalists who a desperate for work sign up as interns for China-based media and work for free. One idea floating around was let those journalists in the future pay for their China-experiences, so at least we would have a decent business model.
Maria, who focuses on payment systems worldwide, has probably found one of the better paid niche market: payment systems. When you work for such a global niche market, yes, you can survive as a journalist in Shanghai in the future. And you need to employ many interns so you can go out and have drinks, like Maria does.
Journalism schools worldwide still churn out every year larger numbers of students that are being prepared for jobs that will not exist anymore in the future. They should save some money, so they can afford an internship in Shanghai.