Increasingly, the United States media is trimming its presence in the Jewish state, andthat means a dearth of nuanced reporting that appeals to American audiences.

One day in 2001, Charles Sennott was in Ramallah. It was early in the second inti­fa­da, and Sennott—then Jerusalem correspondent for The Boston Globe-was watch­ing the daily confrontation between Palestinian kids and Israeli troops on a main traffic junction.

As usual, the teens burned tires and hurled stones; the troops re­sponded with rubber bullets and tear gas. The kids, Sennott noticed, liked to take time-outs at a nearby sandwich shop where they could wash soot off their faces and grab a bite. Sennott, looking for a quirky view to a repetitive story, went to the shop and asked his translator to help him speak with the owner.

The translator didn’t get a chance. “Whaddaya want, buddy?” the man behind the counter said in a thick Boston accent, adding, “I’m from Somerville, Massachusetts. What about those Sox?”

Sennott discovered that the shop owner, Joey Solo­mon, was an Amer­ican-born Palestinian. In 1996, when it looked like peace was imminent, Solomon had returned to his father’s native town to throw his lot in with a Palestinian state-to-be. In Ramal­lah, he opened a sub shop like the one his father once ran in Somer­ville. Now, Solomon was acting out conflicted feelings: serving submarine sand­wiches for free to intifada kids who could not pay—and try­i­ng to talk them into studying instead of throwing rocks. A conversation that Sen­nott had expected to provide a paragraph of reportage turned into a front-page feature that connected his Boston readers to what was happening in the West Bank, to the generation gap among Palestin­ians and to Solomon’s effort to maintain hopes for peace.

That wasn’t the only time Sennott found a hometown connection. A few weeks earlier, he wrote a feature on the Bostoner rebbe, Levi Yitzchok Horowitz, who splits his time be­tween Brookline and the Jerusalem neighborhood of Har Nofor perhaps “Haw Nawf,” as Sennott imitates the rabbi’s Boston-accented He­brew. That story, on Horowitz’s success at building a community in Israel, remindedGlobe readers that there’s more to the country than the conflict with Palestinians.

The current Globe correspondent won’t be filing any such stories—because The Boston Globe no longer has a correspondent in Jerusalem. Last year, the paper closed its last three foreign bureaus, including the Jerusalem office. It was, alas, only part of a trend. More recently, The Baltimore Sun shut its Jerusalem bureau.The Philadelphia Inquirer has done the same, as have other big-city American papers. Other media operations, including network television bureaus, have trimmed their operations in Israel, according to Danny Seaman, head of Israel’s Government Press Office.

The cutbacks aren’t aimed at Israel as such. Rather, the United States me­dia, and especially the press, is cutting overseas coverage in general. Amer­icans are getting less information about the world. For those with a particular interest in Israel, less news is definitely not good news.

The reason for shrinking coverage is straightforward: finances. Increasingly, newspapers must compete with the In­ter­net for both readers and advertising in­come. Young people in particular are more likely to give up on news printed on “dead trees.” Co­lum­bia Uni­ver­sity journalism professor Todd Git­lin recalls asking a class of sophomores re­cently if they had seen a specific story on the front page of The New York Times. Out of more than 20 students, only 1 had seen the story. Classified ads have also moved from paper to the Internet. And the eco­nom­ic downturn is cutting into big display advertisements, slashing news­­paper income fur­ther, Gitlin notes.

Meanwhile, corporate owners are trying to keep profit margins high by lowering costs. One method has been to shrink newspapers’ size. Papers that still print on big broadsheets have actually made the sheet narrower. On less paper, they print less news. They also employ fewer people to write and edit. Layoffs are constant.

And one of the most tempting places to cut is the network of overseas bureaus. The costs of a foreign bureau normally include an office and local support staff, and even English-language schooling for correspon­dents’ children.

“They took good care of the correspondents and their families,” says Sennott. When the Globe announced it was closing its last three foreign bu­reaus, editor Martin Baron said that the move allowed the paper to avoid eliminating a “dozen or so” newsroom jobs.

Not everyone has gone home, of course. Large newspapers like The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times and The Washington Post still have Jerusalem bureaus. Their stories are syndicated to other newspapers. The Associated Press and Reu­ters continue to pump news copy out of Israel and the territories daily. Indeed, the AP’s Jerusalem bureau chief, Steven Gutkin, notes that the agency has made a deliberate decision to buck the trend and to expand international coverage. If demand is down from newspapers, AP will provide more multimedia material that can reach a new audience via the Internet, or even via cell phones.

The fact that there are fewer newspaper correspondents definitely has a price. “There’s a free market of ideas and impressions,” with each correspondent add­ing a unique product, says New York Timescorrespondent Steven Erlanger. While Erlanger naturally takes pride in his own paper’s coverage, he stresses that “there are fewer eyes on the world for American citizens and voters, and for readers around the world on the Net, and…it’s impoverishing.”

Backing that up, Sennott recalls covering the lynching of two Israeli soldiers in Ramallah in October 2001. In the street in the roiling city, he spotted many colleagues. “The num­ber of correspondents on the street…created many more angles of coverage,” he says, ultimately providing a richer picture of the terrifying event. “We all step up the game with greater competition.” Sennott, who had a strong interest in Pal­estinian Christians, no­ticed the irony that the violence took place next to the Friends School, a century-old institution teaching the Quaker message of nonviolence. The lynching “will teach the Jews not to come to our land,” said a ninth grader from the school who had not ab­sorbed the educational message.

Since news agencies’ daily reports cover the breaking news items—political crises, terror attacks, border skirmishes—correspondents for individual papers try to look for something extra. That can mean the angle that pulls in readers not normally in­ter­ested in foreign news (a Somer­ville sub shop own­er in Ramallah). It can mean features on culture, society or religion that let readers know there is more to Israeli life than the endless conflict.

News agencies depend heavily on local staffers. A foreign correspondent, suggests Erlanger, may have grea­t­er in­dependence, especially in a tense place like Gaza. His example: In 2005, a television soundman with French citizenship was kidnapped in Gaza, and then re­leased. Erlanger was ab­le to report that a prominent Gaza clan kidnapped the man and that French President Jacques Chirac had pressed Palestinian Author­ity Pres­i­dent Mah­moud Abbas to do every­thing to free him. Ignoring advisers, Abbas freed six jailed members of the clan, including convicted mur­derers, to win the hos­tage’s re­lease. The clan’s role highlighted the chaos in Gaza; the resolution of the af­fair made Abbas look weak. The story, Erlanger says, may have been “too controversial” for agency journalists, or perhaps the age­n­cies did not see it with the same eyes.

There’s a flip side to that argument. Newspapers that no longer have bu­reaus, says Gitlin, might get coverage from local stringers—freelancers with whom they work regularly. The string­ers may actually be “freer of the conformities” of full-time correspondents concerned that they must cover every story their colleagues have. (A “herd mentality” can work against the im­pulse to be original, to get a unique an­gle, Gitlin notes.)

In Israel, the string­ers are often im­migrants from English-speaking countries, here for the long term and more familiar with local life than a correspondent on a three-year assignment. But realizing those ad­van­tages de­pends on whether editors seek out string­ers, encourage quirky coverage and squeeze foreign news into papers that have gone on a diet.

True, if you are motivated, you can still get plenty of Israel news. Maga­zines provide features and anal­ysis for the high-interest audience. Online, readers can check the Web sites of the major papers that still have correspondents. They can also read Israeli pa­pers—Ha’aretz and The Jerusalem Post—in English. But the Israeli pa­pers are written primarily for Israelis. Their reports often lack the political con­text and the explanation of cultural concepts that a journalist writing for overseas should provide.

“One of the rewards of newspapers,” says Gitlin, “has been that in getting from Point A to Point C…you graze by Point B, something that you wouldn’t have gone looking for.” In print, rich coverage from a correspondent thinking of the home audience can grab someone who had no intention of reading about what it’s like to live in the southern Israeli town of Sderot under missile fire from Gaza, or for that matter about life in Gaza.

“You get the stratification of society according to knowledge,” Gitlin says. The gap between those who know the most and those who know the least grows; the information middle class gets smaller. And the people who know the least are most impressionable, most likely to be influenced by slogans and simplistic arguments.

None of this was imaginable a decade ago, when newspapers were flush, the Internet was new, and foreign cor­respondents were tripping over each other in Israel. No one knows whether the next decade will see the extinction of foreign bureaus along with the vanishing of newspapers—or new business models that will revive both.

In the meantime, you may have to look harder for nuanced, complex cov­­er­age of Israel. Your local paper, even in a big city, is less likely to have it. If it still does, you might want to let the editor know you want it to stay, before it vanishes in the next cut­back.

The days are past when you could count on news from Israel in your hometown accent.