McClatchy and Christian Science Monitor to share foreign reporting for 3-month trial

Sacramento Business Journal:

The McClatchy Company and the Christian Science Monitor are initiating a content-sharing agreement that will offer print and online readers of McClatchy’s 30 daily newspaper and of the Monitor more timely foreign reporting, McClatchy announced today.

The Monitor and McClatchy will make stories by some foreign correspondents available to each other when they’re ready for publication. The agreement includes two McClatchy reporters, Shashank Bengali, in Nairobi, Kenya, and Tyler Bridges, based in Caracas, Venezuela. McClatchy also has foreign bureaus in Baghdad, Beijing, Cairo, Jerusalem and Moscow. Two Montior reporters will also be included, Mark Sappenfield, based in New Delhi, and Sara Miller Llana, based in Mexico City. The Monitor has 18 bureaus, as well as stringers and contract reporters.

The agreement is for three months, at which time both parties will evaluate it and decide whether to continue the agreement as is, or end or expand the agreement.

“At a time when America’s economy, national security, environment and even health are bound more closely than ever to the rest of the world, we’re pleased to be able to give McClatchy readers access to some of the world-class foreign reporting for which the Monitor is famous,” McClatchy Washington Bureau chief John Walcott, who oversees McClatchy’s foreign bureaus, said in a news release

This account doesn't mention The Christian Science Monitor's bureau in Baghdad -- strange. Will this agreement trigger closure of McClatchy's -- or the Monitor's -- Baghdad bureau? As the Iraq war has all but ended, McClatchy should be looking at other hot spots in the world.
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Hat tip: Walter Abbott
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