by SAKINA RANGWALA

Armed with a camera and a laptop computer, digital journalists are setting out to report from faraway lands like India. At a time when maintaining foreign bureaus is becoming too expensive, these correspondents are working as one-person operations.

India is gaining prominence as a headline-maker due to its economic and diplomatic ties with the United States and its strategic location to turmoil-ridden Pakistan and Afghanistan.

“The country has a large English-speaking population, which many Americans want to know about, and it has a growing economy and business opportunities, which ABC News wanted to explore,” said Chuck Lustig, foreign news director at ABC News.

“There is no other economy in the world — other than China — that’s now growing at this rate,” Rahul Chhabra, India’s Minister of press, information and culture said.

Chhabra said Boeing and Microsoft are setting up research and development operations in India, employing thousands of people.

iStock.

Keith Richburg, foreign editor at The Washington Post, said the importance of India lay in its proximity to other countries such as Bangladesh, Nepal, Sri Lanka and Pakistan.

“We’ve always had a fully-staffed bureau in India, and before Sept. 11, India, Afghanistan and Pakistan were covered from the same base in New Delhi,” Richburg said. “After Sept. 11, we started sending a reporter into Afghanistan. But only earlier this year we made a decision to recruit separately in Pakistan, so that our reporter, Emily Wax, can spend the majority of her time in India.”

Richburg said that as India has grown economically, it has become important for an independent correspondent to be stationed there as opposed to parachuting in and out of neighboring countries.

As a result of the changing logistics, cost and style of foreign correspondence, ABC News sent two digital reporters to India in October. The network recruited Nick Schifrin for its New Delhi bureau and Karen Russo for Mumbai.

Photo provided by Karen Russo
ABC News digital reporter Karen Russo filming
inside the Kaziranga National Park.

Before joining ABC News, Russo was a print journalist with The Boston Globe and The Associated Press. She joined ABC News in 2003 as an associate producer at “Primetime,” and most recently was a field producer for “Nightline.” She described the opportunity of going to India as something she had wanted to do since high school.

“We were given this opportunity because we were willing to do something risky, like someone gives you a camera and a computer and says, ‘Go!’ ” Russo said. She has already completed roughly two months of her scheduled two-year stint in Mumbai.

Since she’s been in India, Russo has traveled from north to south. She has reported on the traffic and noise of Mumbai. She’s been to Bangalore to report on a young girl born with eight limbs and has reported on a one-horned orphaned rhino in the Northern Kaziranga National Park in Assam, India.

Though Russo reports for ABC News’ various digital outlets, it can be a challenge. She said uploading videos, modifying the settings on Avid and even accessing the Internet can sometimes lead to technical problems.
“I am starting to change a little bit now. I am starting to realize …the fact that everything is a struggle, is cool,” she said.

Photo provided by John Lancaster
Washington Post Foreign Correspondent John Lancaster reports from the Pakistan-controlled region of Kasmir in 2006, a few months after a massive earthquake rocked the territory.

“There are a million other things,” Russo said that were potential problems, such as the time differences and technical support available only on the phone, although she can call the London desk 24 hours a day.

John Lancaster was a foreign correspondent for The Washington Post from 2002 to 2006. He said it cost thousands of dollars per month to run a foreign bureau in India. Lancaster said his personal home in New Dehli also served as his bureau, staffed with an office manager, a local correspondent and translator with domestic help.

“People are not going to have camera crews or sound people. They are going to do everything themselves with digital cameras and laptops, in a very cost effective way. It’s a new model that embraces digital technology,” Lancaster said. “When I was in India, first I would file with photographs, and occasionally take videos myself, and we would be encouraged to take digital photographs for the Web site. But it was in the last year or two when we were especially encouraged not just to think about the stories but were asked to think about multimedia.”

Lancaster said that apart from the use of digital technology, traditional foreign correspondence had not changed much.

“I mean you are still going out there to find good stories that illuminate something about the country that you are covering,” he said. Lancaster said the challenge was getting information and writing stories in such a way that had relevance to people in America.

Lancaster wrote on development issues in rural areas, while he reported on Naxalite rebels living in the countryside. He said rural areas were as important as the economic boom in the urban setting because a sixth of the population in India is still rural.

“I did urban stories about medical outsourcing and western influences in Bollywood. But I also had to deal with Nepal and Sri Lanka and Pakistan, which took a lot of time,” he said.

Lancaster, who is now in Washington, is going back to India in January for a project with National Geographic.

“I got tired of writing newspaper stories, and wanted to try writing a long form of journalism,” he said, adding that he will be there for about a month.

(This version was updated on 12/08/07.)