Juggling the World, Wearily
By ARTHUR S. BRISBANE
A DAY in the life of the New York Times foreign desk begins with Laurent Gbagbo holed up in the basement of his fortified residence in the Ivory Coast’s main coastal city of Abidjan.
As the day progresses, The Times’s foreign operation will reel in stories from five continents, operating on overdrive as it has since January when an extraordinary run of world events began. As for Mr. Gbagbo, he’ll be stuck in the bunker all day, going nowhere except the front page of the next day’s Times.
It’s 7:30 a.m. on Tuesday, and the early man on the foreign desk, J. David Goodman, is staring at a computer screen in the New York newsroom, tracking stories. Here, the broad sweep of foreign news lies in his view — the Arab spring, the catastrophes in Japan, war in Afghanistan, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the struggle for power in Ivory Coast, and more.
In my line of sight over Mr. Goodman’s shoulder, I look through a window onto a news-gathering operation pushed to its limits — not only by the volume and urgency of the news but also by the rapid changes brought on by digital technology. I have decided to spend the better part of a news cycle here to understand better how this works.
Right now Mr. Goodman is deciding what to make of a new Associated Press report saying that the forces of Alassane Ouattara, Ivory Coast’s legitimate president, have seized the home of Mr. Gbagbo, who has refused to step down after losing an election. Should Mr. Goodman update the current article on The Times’s Web site? Ed Marks walks in, one of several editors on loan from other desks to help with the load, and the two discuss the story’s sourcing. Mr. Goodman has been unable to reach The Times’s lead reporter on the story, Adam Nossiter, who is working from neighboring Ghana, to get his take.
“Take a look,” Mr. Goodman says. “I just put a line in.” Mr. Marks starts to edit as Mr. Goodman turns his attention to Laura Kasinof, a stringer who has just called in from Yemen, where she is The Times’s only person on the ground. She has some tidbits for him about scattered developments there, but as she rings off, he says to me, “Things are always confusing in Yemen.”
This is how it will go through the day with the Ivory Coast and many other stories, as fragments fly through the ether and The Times works to verify and publish. Always, though, as the day progresses, a dual mission remains in sight: update news for the Web, yes, but also build stories for tomorrow’s newspaper — especially for the front page.
To do this, the foreign desk operates within a complex system of networks, real and electronic. In the physical network, now stretched by fatigue and rising costs, The Times deploys photographers, correspondents and stringers around the globe, some in bureaus and others on the fly in hot spots. The Times also works closely with The International Herald Tribune, branded as the “global edition” of The Times, and its bureaus in Paris and Hong Kong.
The electronic network of The Times can be seen on Mr. Goodman’s two computer screens. News pours in from the wire services, like The Associated Press, Agence France-Presse, Bloomberg and Reuters. Twitter feeds arrive constantly with updates from bloggers and competitors of all kinds. Times internal systems for print and the Web site display and manage stories-in-progress. Instant messages blink on continually as staffers try to stay on the same page.
Presiding over this is Susan Chira, who has been the foreign editor since early 2004. She doesn’t actually have time to “preside,” though. She edits articles, makes decisions, provides moral support to the troops and tries to keep the big picture in view.
“Hey, Adam,” she says to Mr. Nossiter, who has called in to discuss traveling into Ivory Coast from Ghana. “You have been incredibly resolute. Is flying in going to be under the protection of the French?”
Bad things can happen on the foreign desk, and Ms. Chira and her colleagues put in a lot of time trying to prevent them. At the top of the list is the harm that can come to journalists in war zones. On March 15, four Times journalists were seized in Libya and held for six days, just the latest in a series of such events.
On this day, no planes are heading to Abidjan and the decision is that it’s too dicey for Mr. Nossiter to drive through contested territory. Likewise, in a conversation later in the day with C. J. Chivers, a correspondent in eastern Libya, Ms. Chira decides against inserting Times journalists in a perilous spot elsewhere in that country.
Preventing other bad things drives decision-making on the foreign desk, and avoiding journalism errors under pressure ranks at the top of the list. Many editors on the desk express concern about the steady flow of news developments and the pressure to post updates on the Web. “We are weighing ourselves against the wires,” Ms. Chira says. “That’s new for us.”
Rick Gladstone, the day editor who keeps the desk’s working list of stories and makes sure The International Herald Tribune gets fed on time, says: “We have become a news service that runs a newspaper. We are all wire editors now.”
Greg Winter, the editor responsible for sub-Saharan Africa, calls me over to point out what can happen. Reuters has moved a headline alert saying that Mr. Gbagbo has surrendered, according to an “internal document.” Mr. Winter doubts it. No other news services are reporting this, and it seems odd that an “internal document” would contain breakthrough news in such a fluid situation. He decides not to go with it. Good thing: minutes later Reuters revises and pulls way back. Mr. Gbagbo isn’t going anywhere.
Except to the front page, that is. For all of the pressure to feed the Web and The International Herald Tribune and respond to rapid bursts of breaking news, the foreign desk still leans toward the “front” — Page 1.
The Gbagbo story is updated through the day, but once the top Times editors decide it is going out front, Mr. Winter works with Mr. Nossiter and Scott Sayare in Paris for a trademark Times story. That means a new article not about the latest incremental news but about the meaning of it all.
“Why do people care?” Mr. Winter says. “It’s not just the day’s news. The focus of the story was that international diplomacy failed. Only force could resolve the issue.”
And so it went. On Wednesday morning, Mr. Gbagbo found himself still holed up in the basement, but now more famously so.
