Globe to close last three foreign bureaus
The Boston Globe said yesterday it is closing its three foreign bureaus as part of efforts to trim costs, ending more than three decades of reporting from staff members based overseas.
The paper has had bureaus in a number of locations -- including East Asia during the Vietnam War, Moscow during the Cold War, and Baghdad during the Iraq war. Globe reporters have covered global health issues from Africa, the struggle between moderate and radical Islam from the Middle East, and the prospects for peace in Northern Ireland from Belfast.
Over the years, Globe reporters won several awards for foreign reporting, including the George Polk award in 2002 for coverage of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Reporter Elizabeth Neuffer was killed in a car accident covering the aftermath of the US invasion of Iraq in 2003. And Anthony Shadid, who won the Polk award, was seriously wounded in the West Bank in 2002.
"Our reporters took enormous risks for many years to try and cover the world for our readers," said James F. Smith, the Globe's foreign editor.
The shuttering of foreign bureaus is the latest cost-cutting precipitated by shrinking Globe revenue. It follows the recent decision by The New York Times Co.'s New England Media Group, of which the Globe is the largest holding, to offer buyouts to employees to cut about 125 jobs, including 19 in the Globe newsroom and editorial pages.
Calling it a "period of hard choices," editor Martin Baron said in a memo that closing bureaus in Berlin, Bogota, and Jerusalem avoids cutting an additional "dozen or so" newsroom jobs. The four reporters in those bureaus will be offered other jobs , Baron said.
They are Thanassis Cambanis and Anne Barnard in Jerusalem; Colin Nickerson in Berlin; and Indira Lakshmanan in Bogota.
"We concluded that it would be unwise to meet the newsroom's financial targets by making additional staff reductions," Baron said . He added that the paper will continue to send reporters and photographers overseas for special projects and major events.
The Globe is among several big-city newspapers that have closed foreign bureaus in recent years as the industry has consolidated. In the summer, for example, the Baltimore Sun said it would shut bureaus in South Africa and Russia after closing offices in the United Kingdom and China in 2005.
Tom Rosenstiel, director of the Project for Excellence in Journalism, a nonprofit research group in Washington, said big metropolitan newspapers are sustaining the biggest circulation and advertising declines, in part because the Internet has given readers easy access to national and international papers such as The New York Times. As a result, readers no longer "have to rely on metro papers" for international news, and the papers are responding by cutting foreign coverage.
"This is part of the diminishing ambition on the part of American newspapers," Rosenstiel said. "For 150 years you could measure the quality of a newspaper by how many bureaus it had and how broad its sweep was, not how many city council meetings it covered."
The Globe opened its first foreign bureau in Japan in the early 1970s. As recently as five years ago, the Globe maintained five foreign bureaus, plus one at the United Nations.
In his memo, Baron called the paper's foreign coverage a "point of special pride in our newsroom." But ultimately, he said, Globe management was guided by the principle to "secure the resources required for local coverage and for journalism that has the most direct impact on our readers."
Robert Gavin can be reached at rgavin@globe.com. 
