The Readers' Editor on Why the Guardian Invests in International Coverage

The earthquake that has caused further death and destruction in Indonesia this week received immediate and fairly extensive coverage in the Guardian because the paper's resident correspondent in south-east Asia was there when it happened. He had arrived in Sumatra earlier from Jakarta, where he is based. His main purpose was to make a return visit to the village of Nusa, about 10 miles from Banda Aceh, the provincial capital.

After the Boxing Day tsunami one of the points made at the editor's morning conference in London was the need to stay with the story through the months ahead, reporting on the relief effort and on rebuilding and recovery. One way in which the Guardian's foreign desk has been meeting this commitment is through regular visits, in particular to Nusa, where the tsunami killed 24 villagers, 12 of them children.

The Guardian correspondent, John Aglionby, had returned from the village and, after a long working day, was asleep in a rented room in Banda Aceh when the earthquake woke him just after 11pm. He described the effect in a front-page report on Tuesday this week. It was, he said, the most violent earthquake he had experienced.

The electricity went off for about 45 minutes, but no buildings collapsed and a certain amount of initial panic began to subside. The office rang and it was already clear that the most severely affected area was several hundred miles away, on the island of Nias, off the west coast of Sumatra.

He caught the first flight to Medan, an hour away by plane on the east coast, hired a car and drove across the island to Sibolga, on the west coast facing Nias. That night, with others, he set out for Nias in a rented wooden boat. Its engine failed in a storm and rough seas. They managed to find shelter in a bay on a nearby island and then, hours later, to return to Sibolga. He finally reached Nias on an Indonesian warship, and his first report from the island appeared in the Guardian on Thursday. As I write he is the only journalist to have reached Lahewa, on the north coast of Nias, the town nearest the epicentre.

Why does the paper place such a high value on its coverage of foreign news and spend so much energy in getting it? One reason is that its readers do not want a close horizon. Andrew Marr, in his recent book, My Trade (Macmillan), cited foreign news coverage as one of the main distinguishing features between what we once called the broadsheets and the tabloids, saying that in this respect there was a yawning gulf between them, whereas in other respects there were signs of convergence. The Guardian, he said, was "likelier than any other paper to put long foreign stories on the front page".

Certainly the commitment to international news will be reflected just as strongly in the new Le Monde-shaped Guardian due to emerge within the next year. As the foreign editor pointed out, the need to know about the world, always reflected in the Guardian, has quickened since September 11 2001.

The Guardian now has 21 foreign correspondents, made up of staff journalists or reporters on full-time contracts. In addition it has about half a dozen on part-time contracts, and a long list of "stringers" - freelance correspondents - upon whom it can call in most parts of the world. Then it has four specialist correspondents who travel extensively from London (among them, the diplomatic and Middle East editors). It has five full-time correspondents in the US, two in Brussels, others in Paris, Berlin, Rome, Madrid, Zagreb, Moscow, Israel, Baghdad, Delhi, Islamabad, Beijing, Tokyo, Nairobi and Pretoria. One (big) gap of which the paper is conscious is South America.

The foreign editor says, "You have to give correspondents the time and resources to go off and do their own reporting." That way, she says, not only the big events get covered, but you also get pieces that take you closer to people and places and convey the sense of being there.

The editor of the Guardian believes the paper gains a great deal through its commitment to resident correspondents. He also points to the way in which the strength of the Guardian online, giving the paper millions of readers outside the United Kingdom, has affected the position of its correspondents, raising their profile in the host countries, subjecting them to greater scrutiny but giving them enhanced access to sources.

To return to the starting point, about 5,000 readers in Indonesia have looked at the Guardian online this week, perhaps to see what interest events in their part of the world have stirred in the rest of us.