AP Foreign Correspondents in Action

Giovanna Dell'Orto is an Associate Professor at the University of Minnesota's School of Journalism and Mass Communication. She teaches and researches the interplay between news, journalistic practices, and international affairs, topics she has lectured about to academic and professional audiences from China to Chile. A former newswoman with The Associated Press and fluent in four languages, she is the author of American Journalism and International Relations, also from Cambridge University Press, which analyses foreign correspondence's impact on American foreign policy from 1848 to 2008. She is also the author or editor of three other books on journalism and foreign affairs. Dell'Orto received her PhD in Mass Communication from the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities.

• 1. Introduction; 2. Getting ready, getting started, and getting lost in translation; 3. What's the story? News judgment, news pitches; 4. Getting to the sources (and keeping them alive); 5. Being an American abroad – perceptions of journalists; 6. Eyewitness reporting: getting to the scene; 7. The costs of being there to count the bodies; 8. Your byline today, mine tomorrow: teamwork and competition; 9. Access, censorship, and spin: relating with foreign governments; 10. Flacks, spooks, and objective journalists: relating with the US government abroad; 11. Getting it out, getting it edited: filing news and handling editors; 12. The evolving milkmen: writing for an audience; 13. Purpose and influence of foreign correspondence; 14. Eight decades of bearing witness and telling the world's stories: conclusions.

'In war and peace, Americans rely on the Associated Press for much of their news of the world. Through oral history, Giovanna Dell'Orto has gone behind the AP's bylines and datelines to capture its foreign correspondents' personal stories of the often perilous ways in which they got that news.' Donald A. Ritchie, author of Reporting from Washington: The History of the Washington Press Corps