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When a knife-wielding teenager allegedly attacked children at a dance class in northwest England last month, news organizations scrambled to cover the unfolding story. The violence in the town of Southport resulted in the murder of three children and the wounding of ten, and sparked riots fueled by rumors and misinformation about the attacker.
Early in the story, however, most reporters weren’t actually where the news was. The Washington Post and New York Times, for example, relied on reporters in their London bureaus, located some 230 miles from Southport—roughly the distance from New York to Washington.
Such remote reporting is common, of course. Reporters often can’t get to where a news story is occurring, either because the site is inaccessible (such as a war zone) or, in the case of Southport, because getting there would create hours-long delays in producing the story. But the practice raises an obvious question: Can a news story reported from hundreds, and sometimes thousands, of miles away be complete and fully accurate?
The answer to that question is almost certainly no. Reporters don’t know what they haven’t seen, heard, or even smelled when they’re not there. Eyewitness accounts and all-important “color”—the details that enliven and deepen a story—typically go missing. The reporting can be derivative, reliant on the few journalists who actually made it to the scene.
In the case of the British stabbings, many of the remotely reported first-day accounts didn’t pick up on the ominous spread of online rumors and misinformation by far-right activists, who falsely identified the suspect as a migrant. And so news desks were surprised when riots erupted in several English cities a few days later. (British authorities remain on alert for further violence.)
While remote reporting certainly wasn’t unusual in the past, it is growing in an age of strapped news budgets and anxious editors addicted to social media or cable news and keen to make sure they don’t “miss the moment.” Years of newsroom cuts have reduced or eliminated many foreign and domestic news bureaus, creating even greater distance between the news and those who report it. Travel budgets are strained or, in some places, nonexistent.
Whatever they may have missed by not getting to Southport on day one, the Times and Post are among the few remaining domestic news organizations with the resources to send a reporter—and often a team of reporters—to wherever important news is happening (the Times‘ reporter, Megan Specia, made it to Southport a day later). “We are firm believers in the value of on-the-ground reporting,” Nicole Taylor, a Times spokesperson, told me. The paper strives to send a staff reporter to the scene of breaking news, she said, and has developed a “deep network” of stringers and local freelance journalists to report when it cannot.
To be sure, technology has made the job of reporting from many miles away faster and easier (if not always more accurate). A reporter sitting in a distant newsroom can access an array of local reporting, blogs, amateur videos, and social media posts via a computer. Former Washington Post reporter Tara Bahrampour said she benefited from a host of new tools each time she covered uprisings in the Middle East between 2009 and 2022, typically while reporting from neighboring countries.
Skype enabled her to interview dissidents and activists inside Iran during its Green Movement protests in 2009, and satellite phones made it possible to file from places where the internet and cellphone service were blocked or not working. More recently, while reporting on the protests that erupted in Iran after a young woman, Mahsa Amini, died while in police custody, Bahrampour maintained regular contact with sources via encrypted apps like WhatsApp.
Sometimes the view from afar can be almost as illuminating as actually being there. Bahrampour recalls traveling near the front lines during an uprising in Libya in 2011 and realizing that being there, amid the chaos and confusion, “would not do my stories, myself, or anyone else any good.” So Bahrampour instead reported from field hospitals, newly liberated towns, and rebel-held cities. “It’s always good to be physically present,” she said. “But you sometimes get better stories from the next town over,” where refugees and fighters can provide a better composite of what’s happening.
And, to avoid coating an earlier era in nostalgia, it’s important to remember that those who were right on the spot often couldn’t actually get the information out in the time before cellphones. Ruben Castenada remembers covering the massive Mexico City earthquake in 1985 for the Los Angeles Herald Examiner (now defunct). Phone lines were down all over Mexico City. So he dashed to the airport, found a young woman who was traveling with children to Guadalajara, and asked her to transport his notes to a colleague who was in that city. He reached into his pocket and offered the woman $100; she refused. “For the children,” he said, handing over the bills. The woman delivered his notes, which made it into the paper’s coverage the next day.
When Tom Lippman, a former Washington Post editor and Middle East correspondent, was running the Post’s bureau in Cairo in the mid-1970s, thieves had ripped out so much of the local phone system’s copper wiring that service was unpredictable. Sometimes, on breaking stories around the region, Lippman could rely on stringers who communicated via telex, a precursor to the fax machine. But in the absence of any on-the-ground connection, he’d go to the Cairo press center and read dispatches from government-owned news media, such as the Saudi Press Agency and the Syrian Arab News Service—“for what they were worth,” comments Lippman. Other times he’d resort to sending a telex to the Post’s bureau in London, asking colleagues to call people around the region and ask them to call him in Cairo (incoming international calls occasionally got through).
Modern reporters, especially younger ones, face a more mundane obstacle to “going there”: their own workload. The volume of aggregated, remotely reported stories demanded each day by their editors all but precludes leaving the office to cover a story, even one across town, said Doug Struck, a longtime journalist and the associate chairman of the journalism department at Emerson College in Boston. Many of the budding reporters he’s taught now work remotely and don’t have access to a car. Some don’t even have driver’s licenses, he said.
In his college journalism classes, Struck said, he’s boiled down his journalistic Ten Commandments to just two: 1) More reporting means a better story; and 2) “Just go.” When they hear the second commandment, his young charges often look at him “blankly,” Struck says. But when he finally persuades them to go to the scene of a story and conduct interviews, “they come back giddy with the discovery that it has all the advantages we know it does.”
Other notable stories:
- Yesterday, Donald Trump sought to wrest the news cycle back from Kamala Harris, who has dominated media attention in recent weeks, by convening a press conference at Mar-a-Lago—and he succeeded, albeit not in the way his aides might have hoped. Among other rambling and false claims, Trump said that the crowd for his rally in DC on January 6 was bigger than for Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech (it wasn’t), that Harris replacing Joe Biden on the Democratic ticket is unconstitutional (it isn’t), and that he once had a near-death helicopter ride with Willie Brown, a former mayor of San Francisco who told him “terrible things” about Harris, whom Brown once dated. (Brown told the San Francisco Chronicle that this never happened.) Meanwhile, Trump committed, after some wavering, to debate Harris on ABC News on September 10.
- More than a week after the National Association of Black Journalists caused controversy, not least among its own members, for inviting Trump to appear at its convention, the reverberations continue. Zeteo’s Justin Baragona explores how Harris Faulkner, of Fox News, was tapped to interview Trump at the event (alongside ABC’s Rachel Scott and Semafor’s Kadia Goba) despite not being an active NABJ member—and this apparently being a requirement for other journalists who hosted panels at the convention. Baragona also reports that “the NABJ contacted Fox about Faulkner’s participation shortly after her lengthy and friendly interview with the former president,” suggesting that the organization may have felt that her inclusion would help persuade Trump to attend.
- Journalists at Hearst-owned newsrooms in Connecticut announced their intention to form a union; according to the Boston Globe’s Aidan Ryan, they’re seeking “better wages, protections from their jobs being taken by artificial intelligence, and a different return-to-office policy.” In other labor news, the union at the New York Daily News demanded an apology from the city’s police department after a top official “attempted to physically intimidate” a reporter at the paper. (They have since met to clear the air, the official said.) And yesterday was the last scheduled day of bargaining at Crooked Media, where staffers walked out earlier in the week. So far, there’s no public word of a deal.
- Oliver Darcy, CNN’s high-profile media reporter and author of the Reliable Sources newsletter, announced that he is leaving the network to found an independent venture, Status, which promises “hard-hitting reporting and unflinching analysis on the Fourth Estate, Hollywood, and Silicon Valley.” According to the Times, Darcy plans to fund the venture through subscriptions starting at a hundred and fifty dollars per year, though he is also launching with sponsorship and an ad-sales partnership with The Ankler. CNN said that Reliable Sources will go on hiatus but may return with a new author.
- And—as Nancy Pelosi embarks on a media tour to promote her new book, The Art of Power—The New Yorker’s David Remnick showed the power of the awkward silence in an interview setting, using one to elicit a revealing answer from Pelosi on her role in forcing Biden out of the presidential race. These days, Pelosi seems “a degree less disciplined in her criticism of other political figures,” Remnick writes, though she hasn’t otherwise changed much: summing up her political credo, she said, memorably, that “You take a punch, but you have to be willing to throw a punch. For the children.”
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