Flip through any issue of The Economist and the variety and number of datelines — the lines of text giving the place of writing— are striking. A recent issue featured stories reported from Yangon, Myanmar; Panyijiar, South Sudan; and Maiduguri, Nigeria. Then there are the nautical datelines — “on a boat in the middle of the Mediterranean” — that appear on occasion, too. The datelines illustrate the reach of The Economist’s elaborate network of stringers, fixers, freelancers and staff correspondents in more than 20 foreign bureaus around the world that provide unique reportage on international issues.

Popular culture has tended to romanticise foreign correspondents, depicting them as swashbuckling and debonair, jetting off around the world to hobnob with influential people. It’s a portrayal that isn’t always reflective of the reality. Tom Gardner, based in Ethiopia for The Economist, was the victim of a violent attack in Addis Ababa. And while he enjoys the autonomy his role provides, he says “it can still be tough working on a story without anyone to go to for advice”. Haley Cohen, who is The Economist’s West Coast correspondent based in Los Angeles, also notes that isolation from the paper’s headquarters in London can be a particular challenge. But it’s equally the source of one of the perks: “staying in pyjamas and slippers until inappropriately late on writing days”.

At a time when media organisations are significantly limiting their coverage of foreign news or eliminating entirely their bureaus abroad because of resource constraints, The Economist’s approach is unique. We spoke to Robert Guest, the paper’s foreign editor, about whether the paper has plans to scale back its foreign coverage, how foreign correspondence has changed and how reporters are prepared for their foreign assignments.

We have reporters in over 20 bureaus. It’s fairly unusual. Many news organisations are scaling back their foreign coverage. Will we be following suit or bucking the trend?

Overall, the trend at The Economist over the past 20–30 years has been to steadily increase the number of foreign bureaus. In the short-term, we will be increasing the number of people that we have in already existing bureaus. But we do have plans to open new ones beyond that.

“Each week, we try to give readers a selection of things that they didn’t know that they didn’t know”

What is the mix of content that you aim to include each week in our foreign coverage?

We assume that our readers are intelligent and interested in what’s going on in the world. We assume that they are not turning to us for the latest celebrity gossip. There are obvious news stories that you simply have to comment on. People clearly wish to know what Donald Trump is up to. People clearly want to know what the government in China is up to. They’re interested in what the big changes in technology are and how the big wars are going. They want to know about the big elections.

But each week we try to give them a selection of things that they didn’t know that they didn’t know. An example of this would be the recent piece we ran on the spread of unfamiliar grains. You can also look at stories we’ve done on the evolution of arranged marriage, on how to train good teachers or on how best to integrate autistic people into the workplace. These are stories about big ideas and big trends that readers might not know about.

Then there is the fun and quirky stuff that might be entertaining. We don’t do lists of fluffy cat pictures, but if there is, for instance, an interesting story about the use of elephants to detect landmines in Africa, that’s fantastic.

Notwithstanding the extent of our presence abroad, are there any stories, themes or regions that you feel are underreported?

Yes. What exactly is going on within the Chinese leadership? We simply do not have direct access to that. Nobody does. We can talk to people who probably know something about what is going on, but we cannot pin down Xi Jinping. We’d also really like to know more about what’s going on in North Korea. The things that we have to watch out for are the stories that are in theory findable, but that we’re not necessarily attuned to. Because of the background of the people who work here, we will be very much attuned to what’s going on in universities. We’re much less attuned to what’s going on among the working classes in rich countries and among the rural people in poor countries. That’s something that we have to make an extra effort to investigate and to send reporters to cover and to understand.

How does The Economist prepare staff for foreign postings? Is there any preparation or is it, like journalism more generally, simply a case of sink or swim?

We help them get set up and move them out to wherever it is that they are being posted. We make sure that the previous correspondent has given them a list of contacts. We also make sure that they have time to learn languages or to take hostile environment courses, if necessary.

There is a strong element of throwing people in at the deep end. Obviously, we prepare people. But nothing can prepare you adequately. At some point you just have to take the plunge. Depending on your temperament you will feel lost for the first day or the first ten years. You start off by asking all of the stupid questions. Helen Joyce, our international editor, has quite a good line about this. The first thing she learned in Portuguese when she was in Brazil was “Quais são os problemas?” That’s “What are the problems?” It’s a phrase that covers pretty much everything. You have to travel and to meet people. Ultimately, you will arrive at some sort of understanding of the place.

Another thing that we do is rotate people every few years. A very useful skill that we try to inculcate in our staff is the ability to draw comparisons between very different countries. That kind of perspective is extremely helpful if ultimately you want to be able to write global stories about common problems across countries: How do you deal with the impossibility of providing enough health care for everyone? How do you manage the trade-offs between efficiency and equality? How do you get incentives right so that people are employed? If you know how other places are different from the country that you’re in, it’s much easier to explain it to an outside audience.

Some of the correspondents that I’ve spoken to mentioned that one of the most difficult things about being out in the field is isolation. There’s a sense that you can’t bounce ideas off the hive mind of The Economist quite as easily as you can if you’re based in London. How do you deal with that?

When I started doing this I was making collect calls from a pay phone — do you know what that is?

Indeed I do. I’ve even used one before.

I would make collect calls from a pay phone in the snow by the side of the road in South Korea to the then Asia editor, Emma Duncan. That is how you made contact then. You didn’t have a mobile phone or email. She was very interested in what I was up to and I was curious about what was going on in London and what people there were interested in reading about. Having a good relationship with your section editor in London is essential.

I try to make a point of getting out to as many of the foreign bureaus as possible. The section editors have to travel and get out into their regions, too. We have Slack and email now to help us communicate daily, but the best thing remains chatting by phone. You get a much quicker sense of how enthusiastic or otherwise the correspondent is about the story. It is absolutely imperative to keep communication open.

Does The Economist rely a lot on stringers and freelancers? If so, what proportion of the content that we publish do they produce relative to our staff correspondents abroad?

I would guess that our staff correspondents produce about three-quarters of our content. But we do use stringers or freelancers in places where we don’t currently have staff correspondents. Freelancing is a way that people prove themselves. A lot of our staff — me, for example — used to be freelancers. It’s a very cheap and effective way of testing someone out. If they do a good job as a freelancer abroad, that’s a very good indicator that they’ll be able to do a staff job. It’s one of the best ways into The Economist. The disadvantage of being abroad is that people can’t see you. The advantage is that the editors that you work for really know how reliable you are. If they receive your copy with a sense of expectation of excitement or pleasure, then that is good.