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Comment by estel | Hacker News Reader

Brilliant point. News organisations can really annoy me when they send reporters to the scene of an event just to do the same piece to camera that they could easily have back in the studio, and this is further compounded if they don't speak the languages necessary to do proper reporting.

Also, in a country that's struggling to recover from a disaster, every news organisation sending hundreds of reporters to the region might be a huge drain on resources.

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There's a reason why they still send out reporters to get their boots on the ground and try and figure out what's actually happening. Research.

Any lazy journalist can just sit back, crib a whole bunch of feed and stills and press releases floating off he internet and boilerplate it into the column inches without bothering to make even the most cursory check for facts, but there's a word for such slack jawed lacklustre button pushing: churnalism.

People used to complain about news helicopters flying over scenes of disasters such as flooding, saying things like "Why don't they pick up some of the stragglers and ship them to safety?"

The answer is: Because that is not their job.

Reporting on what is going on is. And that means going in there, asking questions, getting the agency to rope in a native speaker to translate where needed, and actually bearing witness to the sort of things that end up on your screen, or in print.

They have to go in there and report, because nobody else is going to - and if nobody else reports, nobody will know how bad things are until that ignorance comes back and bites us.

Journalists - at least the ones truly earning their crust - do what they do because they have a compelling need to show the world what they do not know, and need to know.

They are the ones whose job it is to bear witness.

Sure. But there's little real research an non-native language speaker can accomplish. And even if you speak the language, if you're not from there, well you're never going to get the inside track. And this is precisely the reason why Al Jazeera has so many foreign bureaus and employs a lot of local staff - way more than any other network.

Al Jazeera didn't invent the idea of foreign bureaus and local staff. Many organization have/had these. Unfortunately most have been forced to cut back due to budget constraints, since they don't have Qatar's ruling family footing their bills.

There's great irony in that being financed by oil rich monarchs ultimately allows Al Jazeera to appear more trustworthy to some viewers.

Irony so thick you can taste the rust.

No, seriously, I believe most reputable papers had foreign bureaus until something like the 70s or the 80s (at least that's the impression I've gotten).

Maybe if CNN focused on making important news relevant to the mass public, it would do better.

I think serious papers had them till the past decade or so.

Totally agree about CNN. I think they are bad for the same reason quality of most products has been decreasing - short term, please-our-stockholders thinking.

They're not going to do any significant research in Japan.

They're going to take establishing footage of their personnel, then repeat aloud what they're told while showing disaster-porn imagery.

Yeah, the nuclear reporting in the first couple of days was terrible, someone on the ground would be repeating a few lines they have been given from someone else without the slightest understanding of the workings of the reactor.

Also had 10 minutes of news on an unsubstantiated claim there was another tsunami heading towards the coast, only to be then told there wasn't.

>then repeat aloud what they're told while showing disaster-porn imagery.

Pretty much standard for a royal wedding then

I think there is a big difference between a television "reporter" (i.e. newsreader) going to Japan for some intro pieces, versus, say, a long-time AP reporter who lives there and understands the region.

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