My Date With the New York Times: The Lost Journalist in Rome

It’s not hard to get lost in Rome. Even when you know exactly where you are, you could be missing the one thing you’re looking for.

In my case, it was the Rome office for the New York Times where I was hoping to discover exactly how to start a journalism career in Europe. On the main road of Corso Vittorio Emanuele, I stood with building 153 to my left and 155 to my right. I needed 154. I stopped in the spot where this building should be, but the road opened up into a tiny piazza, a small open park-like area made of cobblestone where there should be grass, where instead of 154 was a statue of Marco Manghetti and the entrance to il Museo di Roma, a place I had passed countless times when crossing the street from the piazza of Campo dei Fiori to Piazza Navona. But I was lost and confused in an area I thought I knew well.

I called Ian Fisher, the Rome Bureau Chief, who directed me about half a block west and across the street where 154 rested randomly among the 170s.

A man in a pink pinstriped dress shirt and glasses came outside to meet me. I noticed that he wasn’t very tall but he was fairly soft-spoken and serious. We walked toward Largo Argentina where we met up with Tyler, a photographer for the Times who was visiting Fisher and crashing on his couch. Tyler was a tall, dark, earthy looking man with a strong smile and accompanying handshake.

The three of us walked through the tiny dirty cobblestone streets of Roma Centro to a crowded pizzeria where we discovered another New York Times writer: Peter Keifer, the youngest of the three where the only thing giving away his age was the start of crows’ feet at the corners of his eyes and mouth. We gathered around a table in our small exclusive group, eating pizza a taglia and discussing the important matters of being an American journalist in Rome.

“I was lucky,” said Fisher. “It was a reward for going to Iraq.”

Fisher has been working for the Times for over 17 years and came to Rome three years ago after doing his time reporting from Salahuddin. “Not many people get this opportunity to come to Rome,” he said. “It was also the only place my wife was interested in at the time.”

In Rome, it isn’t hard to find work, Fisher said, but making money and a living is another story.

“It’s a hard time for journalism right now,” he said. “There’s just no cash.”

Keifer said the same thing, explaining that he doesn’t want to stay in Rome as a journalist for much longer.

“I have a contract with the Times, but I’m not on staff,” he said. “I’m at that age where I need something a little more stable that offers me more money. It’s just too hard right now. There’s no money in journalism.”

Keifer came to Rome from Los Angeles while working for a magazine that had opened up a Rome base. He snagged the job because in his youth he had lived in Rome with his family and had a basis in the language and culture.

“It was sort of a favor,” he said.

About a year ago, Fisher hired him as a correspondent for the Times.

“I’m lucky because there’s not much work left here in Rome for journalists,” Keifer said.

According to Fisher, three major American newspapers, including the Washington Post, have closed their bases in Rome.

“A lot of places are closing their foreign offices,” Fisher says. “We used to have an office in Greece and a couple other places that are closed now. There’s just nothing happening in Europe anymore.”

However, Washington Post reporter, Pamela Constable disagrees. In the February 2007 report, Demise of the Foreign Correspondent, Constable wrote, “Knowing about the world is not a luxury; it is an urgent necessity,” listing experiences and revolutions she’s witnessed in foreign countries (“the boulevards of Manila, flooded with peaceful demonstrators chanting for Philippine dictator Ferdinand Marcos to abandon power. The slums of Port-au-Prince, Haiti, where a joyful, gyrating mob of slum-dwellers is celebrating the election of populist priest Jean-Bertrand Aristide as president. The highlands of Guatemala or Peru, where grave sites conceal the victims of atrocity”) as knowledge she wouldn’t have been able to share with America had the Boston Globe not had a foreign correspondent.

“But instead of stepping up coverage of international affairs,” continued Constable, “American newspapers and television networks are steadily cutting back. The Globe, which stunned the journalism world last month by announcing that it would shut down its last three foreign bureaus, is the most recent example. Between 2002 and 2006, the number of foreign-based newspaper correspondents shrank from 188 to 141.”

There is only a short list of U.S. newspapers that still have foreign correspondents: the Chicago Tribune, the Christian Science Monitor, USA Today, McClatchy, the Journal, the Los Angeles Times, the New York Times and The Washington Post.

The amount of money it takes to maintain a foreign office is a huge reason why many are closing.

“A typical newspaper bureau overseas costs at least $250,000 a year, according to foreign editors,” wrote Constable, “and a large, security-conscious news operation in a city such as Baghdad can hemorrhage four times that.”

Fisher added, as we took the elevator to the tiny Times office, that since a large

portion of European journalistic work comes through freelancing and the Associated

Press, there isn’t a high demand for European offices.

The office has about four rooms: a large room at the entrance with the desk for the secretary and cabinets for the files, a smaller room with two unkempt desks back to back (one belongs to Keifer), a lounge area with a well-used loveseat, and another large office with an enormous bright blue chair that stood out from the otherwise neutral gray room. This was Fisher’s place. He slouched comfortably into the chair and apologized again for the current state of journalism.

“It’s just me,” he said referring to the actual staffed writers. “We only have about five other employees. The office is very small and it will probably get smaller because,” he said repeating himself with emphasis, “there’s just no cash.”

This problem, however, isn’t due only to the lack of money available to offices abroad. “Now the web has taken over opinion and news,” Fisher said.

With the lack of jobs available in journalism in Rome or abroad in general, I wondered how to get a job without having to work for a paper for 15 years. People have often said that it’s all about who you know, networking and making connections. Fisher doesn’t believe it.

“I knew one minority intern,” he said. “It helps [to know someone] but it’s not decisive. If you can’t write, you can’t write.”

We parted with the only thing he could genuinely offer

me as an aspiring journalist finding myself in the lost part of

Rome: “Good luck.”