Richard Sambrook's recent report on the redundancy of foreign correspondents raises a fair point; that the ubiquity of self-publishing tools make it increasingly redundant for newsrooms to send people to the far corners of the earth merely to tell us what's going on there. From the report, via Journalism.co.uk
"as the traditional foreign news bureaux have shrunk, the opportunities to find out about the world have greatly increased."
But why stop at specifically foreign correspondents? Sure, British and American newsrooms don't need to send journalists to Tierra del Fuego just to stand in front of a camera and find out what's going on, given the existence of Argentine reporters already covering the patch. But by the same token they don't need to send anyone to Michigan or Cornwall either. When much of Cornwall flooded last month the first coverage on the BBC breakfast news was produced via a phone call with a local resident on the scene, and we found out what was going on just fine. There were no newsrooms on the scene when Charles and Camilla were caught up in the protests last night, but there's video of the event nonetheless.
It is often only in extremis that we discover old habits have long been unnecessary.
On the day reporters can't get into St Austell because the town is underwater, we discover that the reporters probably didn't need to. The news was about a bunch of people experiencing a flood, and they can tell us what it's like to experience a flood themselves.
Objectivity is debunked. The technology to report the news is everywhere. What journalism brings to the table is important - it adds context and most of all takes responsibility for making sure that what we hear is true. (As the sophistication of amateur image manipulation technology improves this will become increasingly crucial to the news agenda not being overtaken by plausible lies.) But the need to send a guy with a camera to wherever the news is happening is close to over.
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