[MUSIC UP AND UNDER] A lot of world news this week: In the Middle East, alone, the Lebanese elections, the Iranian elections and a spike of violence in Iraq. In Pakistan, a rash of suicide bombings, in France and Brazil, an investigation into an air disaster and in North Korea, two Americans sentenced to 12 years of hard labor. And that’s what you've already heard about, because those stories got some coverage. But as news organizations continue to cut costs, foreign bureaus have been shuttered, one after another, leaving many a story uncovered altogether. One chain that’s managed to keep some bureaus running is McClatchy, owner of 30 papers, including The Sacramento Bee, The Miami Herald and The Fort Worth Star-Telegram. McClatchy’s managing editor for online news, Mark Seibel, wrote a candid and pretty horrifying piece for Nieman Reports about some of the international stories his newsroom still couldn't afford to cover.

MARK SEIBEL: When the swine flu outbreak occurred, our Mexico bureau was not staffed and we did not send anybody to it. When the Mumbai terrorist attack occurred last year, we didn't send anybody. As the Iranian elections were approaching, we thought long and hard about whether we would send anybody, and for a long time we thought we wouldn't because it simply costs a lot of money to send a reporter into Iran. Finally we decided that we needed to do it. They were giving out visas, and they aren't easy to get. But to do that, what we did was cancel a trip for a reporter to Afghanistan.

BOB GARFIELD: Not a casual trip to Afghanistan, but one that had been long planned and prepared for.

MARK SEIBEL: Well, all the arrangements had been made. The embed arrangements with Canadian forces had been set up. There were lots and lots of interviews that had [LAUGHS] already been planned. It was a decision that was not pleasant to make, certainly not for the reporter, nor for the rest of us who, of course, as journalists we'd like to get out and cover what needs to be covered.

BOB GARFIELD: How have you filled in the gaps left by the closing of your own bureaus?

MARK SEIBEL: One of the things we've done is do an exchange with The Christian Science Monitor. We have bureaus where they don't have bureaus, and they have bureaus where we don't have bureaus. And we just swap stories. That’s one of the ways we've done it. We, of course, parachute people in, as necessary. One of the best examples is when President Obama went to Europe recently we did not send a reporter with the White House staff to travel with them. We sent him separately, because he could get a better airfare, to save a few thousand dollars. That’s how we have been managing the situation now for, for some time.

BOB GARFIELD: One of the most depressing things about reading your piece was my understanding that McClatchy, relatively speaking, still has a fairly robust foreign reporting infrastructure, compared to a whole lot of other news organizations you named. Tell me how others have been affected.

MARK SEIBEL: Newsday, which I always think of as having done some of the best foreign correspondents’ work in the 1990s, Pulitzer Prize-winning work, basically has no foreign staff any more. Ditto The Baltimore Sun - the same with The Boston Globe. The Boston Globe, I used to always think, well, their reporters are going to be – if it was the Middle East, they're going to be breaking stories. They're just not on the playing field anymore. The Dallas Morning News, which used to have both a presence in the Middle East and in Europe, basically covers Mexico now. Even The Miami Herald, where I was foreign editor for years, its Latin American report has really been scaled back to pretty much what happens in the Caribbean. What I find most alarming is the number of reporters who are actually out in the field looking at these events, thinking about these events, talking to different people about these events, have dropped.

BOB GARFIELD: I must ask you this: It seems to me that in years past, when every major news organization had a bureau in, let's say, Mexico City, and something happened there, what tended to happen was we would get 35 stories that looked approximately alike. You know, you had to wonder whether it was a relatively inefficient way of deploying the industry’s resources. You may not have had somebody in Mexico City to cover the swine flu story, but you got the story in the paper. To some extent, isn't this just a more efficient way of serving your readers?

MARK SEIBEL: I disagree that it’s a more efficient way. And the Mexico swine flu event is a really interesting one because I remember waking up and getting the newspaper one day, and there we have exactly the same story in The Washington Post as in The New York Times. Their reporters have both gone off and interviewed the family of the first Mexican victim of swine flu. And I thought to myself, it’s really a shame that the primary organizations that are looking at this problem have both settled on the same story to pass out to the reading public, on the same day. And I know there was other news going on, other avenues to be explored for that story. We weren't on the ground to do that. And so you have to wonder, is this what our foreign news coverage is going to become? The lack of eyes is leaving us partially blind. And, you know, we can all, you know, hail The New York Times and The Washington Post and the Associated Press for the job they do internationally. I think they do a great job. But you have to keep in mind there was a smaller organization, like McClatchy, that got the runup to the Iraq War right. It was Newsday that understood the genocide that was going on in Bosnia, Herzegovina. Those kinds of stories, we're going to see less and less of, as we have fewer and fewer eyes looking at the events.

BOB GARFIELD: Mark, thank you very much for joining us.

MARK SEIBEL: Thank you, Bob.

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BOB GARFIELD: Mark Seibel is managing editor for online news in McClatchy’s Washington, D.C. bureau.