Foreign Affairs, Family Affairs

Charles Trueheart, half of The Washington Post's Paris bureau, was returning home from a reporting trip in December 1996. His wife, Anne Swardson, who is the other half, had been on duty all day. As Trueheart recalls, "I'd been driving through horrible traffic and got home about six and poured myself a glass of wine. We had six little kids there for an overnight birthday party. Just as I was sitting down, we got the call that a bomb had gone off in the Paris subway." No problem: Trueheart, 46, covered the party; Swardson, 44, went out in her jogging clothes to cover the story. The life of a foreign correspondent, once a frequent path to divorce, is increasingly becoming a family affair.

Only 8 percent of the reporters who were posted abroad for the first time before 1970 had journalist spouses, according to Stephen Hess, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution in Washington and the author of International News & Foreign Correspondents (Brookings Institution Press, 1996). But by the 1980s that figure had jumped to 39 percent. Today it has reached 44 percent. Many of these spouses work for competing media outlets; others share a bureau for the same outfit, in a wide variety of financial arrangements.

The trend has as much to do with the increase of women in the news business as with a related development: more journalists marrying journalists. But it also reflects a significant change in newsroom attitudes about the balance between work and family. "A lot of news organizations will now tolerate and encourage journalist couples going overseas," Hess says. "It was a change that was hard-fought."

In the past, says Michael Specter, editors "told you where you were going and on what day, and you told your wife" and that was that. Now Specter, 42, runs The New York Times Moscow bureau with his wife, Alessandra Stanley, 42. Richard Threlkeld, the CBS correspondent in Moscow, remembers a time when there was an unfortunate attitude among editors about foreign correspondents that "the more you whored around and the drunker you got, the harder you were working, and that therefore you were married" to your news organization. Threlkeld, 60, a journalist for thirty-five years, is married to his competition from CNN, Betsy Aaron, 59.

When a woman had a career, Aaron notes, it was often sacrificed on the altar of her husband's. Stories abound of unhappy spouses, usually wives, who traveled far from home to make a life for their families only to have their husbands away on assignment most of the time. But many of these stories have changed. "Where once, to generalize terribly, people were willing to give up marriages for the sake of their careers, people are now willing to accept radical change in their careers for the sake of their marriages and families," says Simon K. C. Li, foreign editor of the Los Angeles Times. Out of twenty-four foreign correspondents, Li's paper has seven overseas correspondents who are married to working journalists.

Kristin Huckshorn, 40, who opened a bureau in Hanoi for the San Jose Mercury News in 1994, feels fortunate to be married to a journalist who was "ready to give me my turn" and to take a chance with his own career in order to do so. Her husband, Tim Larimer, 37, became the Hanoi bureau chief for Time in mid-1996, but he first came overseas as a free-lancer.

It's not necessarily easy when two careers -- and two news organizations -- are involved. Candice Hughes, of The Associated Press, and Richard Boudreaux, 49, of the Los Angeles Times, transferred from Moscow to Rome in February, but "until January, we didn't know if it was going to be a commuting relationship," Hughes says, because she wasn't sure whether she would get posted to Rome. And they are always concerned about the next move.

 Still, "it's like we're living history together," says Boudreaux. "Only people who do this for a living," he adds, can understand the benefits of working side by side. "It's so much richer to really share this kind of life with someone who's into the story."

 When it comes to hiring couples for overseas, The New York Times is the trend setter. By the end of 1998, there will be eight couples working for the paper overseas -- 44 percent of the foreign staff. "If you're a member of a two-career couple, that sort of statistic should be reassuring," says Andrew Rosenthal, the paper's foreign editor.

 One of the reasons the Times started hiring couples was to avoid having Times reporters competing against their husbands and wives, which management didn't like. In some cases, it seems, the Times brought reporters' spouses on board to avoid such competitive scenarios. It was Andrew Rosenthal's father, A.M. Rosenthal, who was executive editor at the paper when the issue of competing spouses began to surface. "I did not think it was a great idea for The New York Times bureau, in a country where there are very few correspondents, and The Washington Post bureau, to, in effect, share news," he says. "I was never against married couples staffing a bureau, but we didn't have many." He says he's "very happy" with the ubiquity of couples now on the foreign staff.

Reservations about couples competing directly against each other seem to have receded somewhat. John Bussey, foreign editor of The Wall Street Journal, says he expects that his China bureau chief, Marcus Brauchli, 36, married to the Los Angeles Times Hong Kong bureau chief Maggie Farley, 31, will remain professionally competitive with his spouse. "You just trust that the one working for you is going to beat the other," Bussey says. "The alternative is to have some rigid, ridiculous rule that says a spouse can't work for a competitor."

 Not every editor is so sanguine. Eileen O'Connor, 38, a CNN reporter who covers the White House, remembers the reaction of her bosses when she and her husband, John Bilotta, 39, returned to Moscow in 1993 -- she to be CNN's bureau chief and he to be a producer for ABC. When they asked her about how it would work, she told them she and Bilotta, now a producer on PrimeTime Live, would work it out the way they always had -- they had been in Tokyo and Moscow together previously -- with ground rules. These include an agreement not to pursue each other's exclusives or features and to take turns excusing themselves at dinner parties so they could speak privately to guests. O'Connor's bosses weren't convinced. She told them, "if you don't want me to be bureau chief, I can pursue other avenues," and their reservations melted away.

The competitive situation, she concedes, did yield some strange moments, particularly after Bilotta (who had proposed to her by telex, from Bonn to Moscow) was named ABC's Moscow bureau chief early in 1995. Once, O'Connor remembers, her husband "snuck out of the house with his suit in a bag because he didn't want me to know he had an interview with Yeltsin." Despite such difficulties, the couple, who now have five children 1 through 7, seem to have worked out the details very well.

Indeed, to hear the correspondents tell it, this trend is a good one, not only for family life but also in a professional sense. Ray Bonner, 55, who answers to his wife, Jane Perlez, the chief of The New York Times Vienna bureau, recalls that "an editor recently commented about how Jane and I really feed off each other. There's a synergy, and we talk about stories and get ideas off each other." Trueheart, of The Washington Post, agrees, noting that talking with a partner helps replace the give-and-take with editors that is lost to vast distances.

"You're there together trying to figure out a foreign culture and a foreign language, and if one of you is doing the shopping and one of you is in the office, the one in the grocery store is just as likely to get the interesting story," says Fred Hiatt, 42, who with his wife, Margaret Shapiro, also 42, pioneered the Post's overseas couples job-sharing arrangement, in the paper's Tokyo and Moscow bureaus.

 By most accounts, sharing a beat with a spouse is vastly preferable to competing. Julia Preston, 46, who works with her husband, Sam Dillon, 46, the Mexico City bureau chief of The New York Times, competed against him when they were both covering Central America -- she for The Washington Post, he for The Miami Herald. After the couple had a daughter (now 7), the competitive arrangement "was becoming logistically impossible," she says. "If a story would happen someplace else, we'd both have to leave, sometimes for unpredictably long times. We felt an increasing need to get more control" over such situations.

 Other couples concur. Working together, they note, allows each to work at home part of the time, and thus makes it easier to be with the children. When a big story erupts, partner/spouses can spell each other.

For editors, the spouse-run bureau has a number of advantages, not the least of which is financial. The employer gets more coverage without necessarily paying full freight for it. For one thing, the two correspondents share housing and other expenses. As for pay, the deals vary.

 At The Washington Post, which has a nepotism rule prohibiting spouses from working at the paper (unless they marry after they start working there), six out of twenty-three foreign staffers are married to each other. All the couples work in some kind of job-sharing arrangement, with the paper paying the salary of one staffer plus some fraction, usually one quarter or one half for the other, and with benefits. In effect, the Post gets two full-time reporters for that reduced price, since each spouse often puts in more than the allotted fraction.

 At The New York Times, the deals also vary. In roughly half the cases, both spouses are hired full time; in the rest of the cases, one is on staff and the spouse is a contract reporter -- no benefits, although the employed spouse's health insurance usually applies.

Jackson Diehl, assistant managing editor for foreign news at the Post, concedes that when the paper started overseas job-sharing in the 1980s, "there was some concern that couples would feel exploited, because many work full time or close to it and don't get full salaries." But, he adds, "most felt it was a really good tradeoff." Cox Newspapers' Joe Albright, 60, and Marcia Kunstel, 50, found themselves working "300 percent" of the time when they were first assigned to job-share in Moscow in 1993. But though they earned less than two full salaries, the advantages were clear. When they covered the uprising in Chechnya, for example, one would be out on the battlefield while the other was in Moscow. "By having two of us on a story like that," says Albright, "we could hold our own against the big bureaus." The couple was posted to Asia in January.

Shared reporting can have its down side. As CBS's Threlkeld points out, "if you have a marriage that already has trouble, the strains of living overseas are only going to make it worse." But most couples say they wouldn't trade the experience for the world. Shapiro and Hiatt went so far as to try to bring their job-sharing arrangement back to Washington with them for an editing job, but management opposed it. "Job-sharing in editing can be confusing," says executive editor Leonard Downie Jr.

At least one couple has managed to job-share both at home and abroad. Will Englund, 44, and his wife Kathy Lally, 50, began rotating monthly in 1984 as education reporters for the Baltimore Sun, then went to Moscow. They returned home to two full-time posts, but this fall went back, with their two daughters, to Moscow. "In a way when you're running a mom-and-pop foreign bureau," says Englund, "the whole family stays close."

cjr  |  archive  |  resources  |  contact  |  search  |  subscribe