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De Volkskrant
De Volkskrant is looking for foreign correspondents -- sort of... |
At first sight, the
online ad in the foreign news section of De Volkskrant (a leading Dutch daily) took me by surprise: We are looking for foreign correspondents, it says.
Hold on -- I have been telling my colleagues for half a decade that classic foreign correspondents are on their way out. Then suddenly De Volkskrant puts up an ad for foreign correspondents?
Fortunately, or maybe sadly, they are not offering paid jobs. Dutch traditional media have just recently discovered this already long-standing trend called "citizen journalism" and now they're try to jump left and right onto that bandwagon. Correspondents get a free online subscription -- that's it. I'm sure it will be a big hit, since people love to do for free those things I used to get paid for.
Tomorrow the Shanghai Foreign Correspondents Club (SFCC), which has been virtually dead for a year, holds its annual meeting in a desperate attempt to survive the changing times. Today, Maria Trombly -- very briefly -- grieves her departure from foreign correspondence.
I knew last week when I got the invitation for this meeting that I might have lost the ability to talk to my foreign colleagues. As their founder and first president, I'm still doubting whether I should go or not. Dinosaurs can be cute and deserve their clubs -- and when they trample on you, they mostly do that by accident. But this FCC meeting at the same time for the media scene might be much more fun and another signal of changing times.
