ABC News opening one-man foreign bureaus

By Paul J. Gough

NEW YORK (Hollywood Reporter) - After two decades of cutbacks in international bureaus, ABC News is bucking the trend by creating one-person operations that will dramatically boost its coverage in Africa, India and elsewhere.

The small offices, staffed by a reporter-producer with the latest in hand-held digital technology, cost a fraction of what it takes to run a full-time bureau. But the work they file will be featured not only on ABCNews.com and ABC News Now but also occasionally on such ABC shows as "World News Tonight" and "Good Morning America."

The mini-bureaus are being opened in Seoul; Rio de Janeiro; Dubai; New Delhi and Mumbai, India; Jakarta, Indonesia; and Nairobi, Kenya.

"Technology now makes it possible for us to have bureaus without a receptionist, three edit suites and studio cameras and so on," ABC News president David Westin told The Hollywood Reporter. "The essence of what we do is reporting, it's not production. Production is the way you get it on the air and to people, but reporting is the essence."

Each of the seven reporters will work from home and travel around their region carrying a small DV camera and editing-enabled laptop. They'll report, write, shoot and edit their pieces, though they also will have support from others at ABC News. Most of the work will be uploaded via broadband to New York, though they will carry a portable satellite dish for the field where broadband isn't available.

It's the explosion in affordable, hand-held technology that makes this possible, ABC News London bureau chief Marcus Wilford said. While it won't eliminate big bureaus like London, it allows the news division to create more content to satisfy its expanding digital platforms without a lot of expensive infrastructure.

"We don't always need a bureau of the old style," Wilford said.

The concept of a foreign bureau isn't going away anytime soon, but the networks are using digital technology to make smarter investments. ABC's seven digital bureaus cost about as much as the full-featured Paris bureau did when it was open. NBC News also extensively uses digital technology in its bureaus with correspondents like Richard Engel (who reported and filmed a documentary about his life in Baghdad for MSNBC last year) and in such far-flung places as Cairo, Moscow, Pakistan and Afghanistan.