No connection is more critical, or more fraught, for journalists than that to their audience. Correspondents risk their lives to tell the stories of foreign peoples and countries to other peoples who should hear about them, while aware that only too often most readers would not care enough to find those countries in an atlas, especially after the first headline-making bursts of disaster. So correspondents conceptualize, report, and write stories with an eye toward attracting those distant eyeballs while unwaveringly staying true to their sources, the reality on the ground, and their ethical standards. When their subjects and topics do get great “play,” on front pages or mobile screens, a child's life might be saved – or correspondents might be hit with a deluge of vicious accusations they have to waste precious time debunking. Thus, the omnipresent, imagined reader is a subtle but key shaper of foreign correspondence, affecting not only the storytelling but the story – a paradox for correspondents who can only hope that their hard-won eyewitness knowledge will eventually matter even to those disinclined to pay attention.

Whom Are We Writing For? (And Where Are They?)

For a wire agency that is a not-for-profit cooperative owned by its U.S. members but with hundreds of millions of readers around the world, defining who the audience is, let alone how to attract it, is inherently problematic: Will those unknown readers understand, need explanation, be offended, be engaged? Until well into the digital and globalization era, when wire stories only saw light in newspapers and on broadcasts, most correspondents wrote for “the milkman” in Kansas City or Omaha, in the words of AP's competitor United Press (Packard 1950; Morris 1957, 42; also Price, 12) – because if the middle-American, non-cosmopolitan middle class got it, journalism's fundamental democratic function worked. Correspondents envisaged as their readers their more curious family members – their busy but engaged parents in Missouri (Bartimus, 15) or grandmother in Florida (Bryson, 10) – and tried to give them a sense of “Here's what I see, this is what it tastes like, this is what it smells like, this is what it looks like,” while acutely aware that on major stories, they were also “writing to officialdom, which added responsibility” (Heinzerling, 13).