Let's summarize the conventional wisdom about foreign correspondents: Their numbers are dwindling. They struggle to get stories on the air. They have trouble staying relevant in today's news climate.

Barry Petersen, a CBS News correspondent in Tokyo since 1995, is here to disprove some of those assumptions. "What is the state of foreign corresponding on network news, as you see it?," I ask.

"Better and worse," the two-time Emmy winner replies:

"In the 'old' days the networks were much more aggressive about covering foreign news in areas like plane crashes, coups, floods. I consider this the 'worse' time. We chased around a lot doing stories that smelled like news but were not very relevant to either American policy or the lives or normal Americans. Now the bar is higher. To get a foreign story on the air it needs to be interesting or relevant or compelling. We still cover some huge, breaking news stories such as the Asian tsunami. But to get enterprise pieces on, especially from Asia, the stories must be that much more interesting. The CBS Evening News just did a series on caring for the aged, and we did one of the pieces. It was about a program in a southern Chinese city where people volunteered their time working with the very elderly, tracked how many hours they worked, and someday will get those hours back when they are in need of care. That story also gave us a chance to show that China, like America, is a changing society. Families once took care of the elderly, but now younger people are moving away for better jobs and, more and more, the elderly must fend for themselves. This in a country with no real safety net for old people. That was what family was for. So we really did two stories -- first about an interesting program of people helping people, and second about how China's culture and traditions are changing as its economy expands. So these are the BETTER but TOUGHER times for a foreign correspondent: our stories must be far more layered, far better produced from concept to shooting to editing, and that is the challenge of reporting from overseas. You can't make a career as a foreign correspondent anymore just doing 1:30 on the latest plane crash."

Petersen first covered Asia from Tokyo in 1986. He moved to Moscow for two years, then was in London for five. He returned to Tokyo in October 1995. On his first stint there, CBS had correspondents in Beijing and Hong Kong, so "I never came to China," he says. Nowadays, he spends about half his year in the fast-growing country.

"I go away from China for a month and come back and there is a new skyscraper up and three new construction sites," he says.

CBS has increased its presence in Asia, he notes. In 1995, he was the only correspondent, but "now we have reporters primarily for our Newspath operation in both Tokyo (Lucy Craft) and Beijing (Celia Hatton)," he says.

In addition to pieces for the Evening News and other broadcasts, Petersen files a weekly "Letter from Asia" for Up To The Minute. They are transcribed on CBSNews.com.

"Every day I come to work asking one question: what can we tell America about the changes in Asia, the trends, the serious events and the fun stories," he says.

And after eleven years in Asia, he still enjoys the assignment.

Steve Harrigan is not your typical foreign correspondent.

For one, the Fox News correspondent is based in Miami. He loves to cover hurricanes when he's not flying to an international hot spot. And lately, many of his reports have been filed from countries like Venezuela, Colombia, and Bolivia -- not the most common destinations for American television correspondents.

"I think Fox might be ahead of the curve on South America and Latin America," Harrigan says. "Whenever I've pitched something like Bolivia, they've said go. Sometimes we'll be on a story like the election of Evo Morales where it seems like we're the only people there."

The countries have been neglected, but they're changing, Harrigan says: "Some countries down there [are] really changing their direction." There are many stories to cover: Massive immigration, hardcore leftists coming to power, anti-American sentiment, etc.

"I think Chavez is going to be a huge story... it's going to come to a head at some point," Harrigan says. He's also particularly interested in covering Cuba over the next few years.

Harrigan has reported from Mexico, Chile, Haiti, Colombia, Bolivia, and Venezuela, among other countries. He says the access has been really good.

"The concern is kidnapping" in some countries, "but after Iraq it really doesn't feel bad," he says. "Colombia really seems like a breeze compared to Baghdad."

Harrigan's been to Iraq about a dozen times.

"Usually when I come back, I think I don't want to go back... But sometimes you see other reporters over there, doing some great reporting, and you watch it, and you get an urge to go back again," he says.

He's going back to Baghdad in July.

Harrigan spent 10 years as a CNN correspondent based in Moscow. Since joining FNC in October 2001, he hasn't stayed in one place for very long.

"For one year I was posted in Israel and I didn't even spend more than a week in Jerusalem," he says.

Harrigan was added to the Miami bureau in December. He estimates that he spends about a quarter of his time in Miami and three-fourths of it on the road.

"I've been bugging them" -- his bosses in New York -- "to cover hurricanes for a while, so they said 'why don't you just move there?,'" he recalls. "This has been a good base as far as that goes."

It's also a good base for coverage of the Southern hemisphere.

"I think [where you live] matters less and less now, so you might as well choose to live somewhere nice," he says.

Harrigan says it's a great time to be a foreign correspondent. "Whenever I come back to the states and talk to people, I am more and more impressed by how much people know and how much people care about what's going on," he says.

As a reporter, his goal is simple: "I try to go to the worst places on earth," he says, delivering the line casually but confidently.

"If I can just get there and tell you what I see and what I think and what I feel, I think that connects with people. They want to see it, they don't want a lecture, they just want to see what's happening in the worst spot."

He tries to show viewers the worst conditions in both battle zones and hurricane zones.

"There's weather guys and there's war guys. But there's a lot of similarities," he says. The one thing different about hurricanes, he adds, is that no one is deliberately trying to kill you.

Harrigan's FOXNews.com columns have been widely praised for their candor. He'd love to write a book -- "we've pitched it to a few literary agents," he says.

All this week, TVNewser is looking at the state of foreign correspondence on television, through the eyes of American reporters in the Middle East, Asia, Africa, and South America.

Iraq. It's inescapable. It's complicated. It's violent. And it's deadly for journalists, as a CBS crew painfully reminded us on Monday.

ABC News senior foreign correspondent Jim Sciutto has traveled to the war-torn country twelve times since the start of the war in 2003.

While answering a question about trends in international news, it doesn't take long for the London-based correspondent to mention Iraq.

"I think the nature of the world, post-9/11, has kept international stories on the radar screen to a consistent degree," Sciutto says. "You've got Iraq. You can't get rid of Iraq, as much as I'm sure some show producers would like to. You do hear the stats that show people turn off or switch [channels] when Iraq news is on. The fact is, you've gotta keep covering it."

Some show producers would like to get rid of Iraq coverage?

"They don't say that, but you can just watch programs to know it's not the happiest story to cover," Sciutto says.

His biggest frustration about Iraq involves the security situation.

"Every time you go back, you have less freedom to cover the story," he says. "It's personally frustrating. and it's journalistically frustrating, because how do you connect [to people]?

Without that connection, Sciutto and correspondents like him might as well stay in London and report the story.

"Will you go back?," I ask.

He pauses.

"I'm sure I will go again," he says.

It must not be an easy question to answer, ever since Bob Woodruff and Doug Vogt were injured in January.

"You realize to yourself that that could very easily be you, based on the kinds of things we do over there," Sciutto says.

After Woodruff was injured, Sciutto traveled to Landstuhl Regional Medical Center in Germany to meet his friend and colleague.

"Walking through the ward there, it's all young men, laid out, with severe injuries. It's that kind of thing, when you have friends injured or lost, that makes it real," he says.

When veteran cameraman James Douglas died in Iraq Monday, Sciutto wrote about him on ABCNews.com. "James was, simply, hilarious. He made you laugh out loud — and I'm talking gut-wrenching, painful laughter — in the worst situations: an endless stint in Kabul, a dusty embed in the Kuwaiti desert, a long nerve-wracking stay in Baghdad," he wrote.

"Nerve-wracking" doesn't seem to do Baghdad justice. As Sciutto explains: "You're sitting there in the bureau and you want to make a piece colorful, and to do that, you have to take risks. And then it becomes a question of how much a risk it is worth."

"A lot of the time, it's timing," he adds. "It's snap judgments."

Sciutto has covered northern Iraq extensively for ABC, receiving two Emmy awards along the way (in 2004 and 2005, for Best Story in a Regularly Scheduled Newscast).

"The bulk of my reporting career has been overseas, which is a hard addiction to get off of," he says.

Sciutto was the Hong Kong correspondent for Asia Business News when he joined ABC in 1998. He was assigned to Chicago for a year before being transferred to Washington, D.C. When a spot opened up in Tokyo, he couldn't pass it up. He is now based in London.

Sciutto loves being paid to explore the world -- "and when you come back, you get to sit down and craft together a little story of what you saw."

There's still room for that on network news, he says:

"If you look particularly at ABC's coverage -- and I'm not just saying this for P.R., but I think it's true in terms of minutes devoted -- we cover more international news than people might imagine."