Observing foreign news
Sir: Andrew King, who laments the space give to journalists' squabbles (Letters, 6 April), will not be happy; but I feel I have to respond to Mark Frankland's depiction of me as one of those editors he deplores for finding foreign news boring and for replacing staff correspondents with stringers and short-contract employees (Letters, 13 April).
Having been a correspondent and foreign news editor for more than 20 years, I must be an extreme masochist if I find foreign news boring. As for staffing, I can only say that, when I was editor of the Observer, I main- tained the number of full-time correspon- dents at the paper — and created a Euro- pean staff correspondent's job which was occupied by none other than Mr Frankland. Of course I took on stringers, but it is a gra- tuitous insult to them to suggest that the resulting copy may have been less honest. To take just a couple of examples, one stringer produced the first major report in a British paper from Rwanda, and another was com- mended in the annual press awards for her reporting from Bosnia. Mr Frankland owes reporters who risked their lives for the paper an apology instead of a superior sideswipe. Rewriting recent history is a stock-in- trade of media columnists. What is irritat- ing in this case is that, during my editorship of the Observer, I had to fend off repeated suggestions by the then editor of the Guardian that the foreign operations of the two papers should be merged under the daily's control. That was held against me when the day of reckoning came. Since my policy had kept the foreign staff, including Mr Frankland, in work, it is a bit hard to be characterised as a parochial editor ready to undermine honest foreign coverage for the sake of saving money.
Jonathan Fenby
South China Morning Post, Dorset House, Quarry Bay, Hong Kong
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