Book looks at role of TV correspondents CARBONDALE, Ill. -For the latest scoop on the TV news biz, pick up "Live from the Trenches: The Changing Role of the Television News Correspondent." The new book rolled off Southern Illinois University's Press last month (Nov 30). It features first-person reflections by nine of the industry's most accomplished working journalists. Joe S. Foote, the book's editor and a media trend watcher, says it's the first book to focus solely on the "foot soldiers of network news." Foote is dean of the College of Mass Communications and Media Arts on SIU's Carbondale campus. You'll scramble alongside ABC's Chris Bury, filing reports from a hectic 1992 Clinton campaign trail. Then duck for cover- and dine on caviar-covering foreign wars and revolutions, detailed by CNN's Jim Bitterman. George Strait of ABC paints vivid images of what it means to be black in a white-dominated profession. Marlene Sanders, who broke ground for newswomen in the '60s, puts a face on gender struggles. And an eloquent Walter C. Rodgers, CNN's Jerusalem bureau chief and correspondent, lends an insider's view of the Middle East. Other contributers include NBC's Roger O'Neil ; CNN's Ed Turner and Garrick Utley; and former KSDK-TV reporter Michael Murrie, now a radio-television professor at SIUC. These are "old-fashioned reporters," Ted Koppel writes in the foreward. "You'll miss them when they're gone." Seems the network news landscape is being buffeted by hurricane-force change. The glory days of these news crews may be gone forever. Foote, in the book's introduction, looks at the influences shaping the evolution. "Corporate downsizing, centralized administrative control and resource cutbacks have dulled the correspondent's luster," he writes. To make matters worse, most networks now seem to emphasize slick news "processing" over original field reporting, he adds. "Networks maintain the illusion of covering the world but they don't have the correspondent corps to do it. There are now 30 percent fewer correspondents than a decade ago. So the only alternative is parachute journalism, covering the story from the anchor desk or not covering it at all," Foote said in an interview. What does that mean for TV reporters? Four of the correspondents-Bitterman, Bury, Rodgers and O'Neil-banter about the human terms in the book's final chapter. All SIUC alums, their discussion came at a network news symposium held on campus in 1996. Each talks frankly about 70-hour work weeks, juggling jobs and families, and surviving network cutbacks. And in the end, they agree, they've still got "the greatest damn jobs in the world." Copies of "Live from the Trenches: The Changing Role of the Television News Correspondent," (159 pages, $22.95 cloth), are available now in selected book stores around the country. To order direct from the SIU Press call 1-800-346-2680 or by fax at 1-800-346-2681, and be sure to include credit card information. There is a $3.50 shipping charge for the first book ordered and 75 cents for each additional copy.
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