More old media Iran fail

After the epic fail of old media a week ago with the Iran situation, it got me to thinking about how old media operate. Basically we parachute some journalist into a country, and get him/her to wear a photographers vest so they can get a feel of the locale, file a story, and fly back home after some time.

Over the past decades of modern journalism, not many organizations have taken the time to REALLY develop local sources. Imagine if in the last 20 or 30 years America's media had taken the time to develop sources in the Iran? Could you imagine where we would be now? The kind of coverage we would be getting now, would be better than CNN reciting what they saw on twitter. They're screwed, because they have no one over there.

On my way to my home country last weekend, this came to me, because I saw a journalist that I was acquainted with many years ago, she told me she was flying in to cover some conference. A conference that could have easily been covered by a local person. A conference that would have been cheaper to cover by a local person. A conference that would have gotten local angles that a foreign journalist would have never written about.

Don't get me wrong, a fresh pair of eyes is always good in any situation, but it strikes me that the mentality that we know best is coming to bite us in the ass as old media close their foreign bureaus and shutter their newsprints. Do you know how far the millions of dollars could have gone in paying cheaper and closer to the situation local reporters, rather than paying Katie Couric and her staff millions of bucks to spend a week in Iraq?

Yup, this has come to bite us in the ass now, as brave citizen journalists in Iran are writing the stories that we're reading now, through facebook, myspace, twitter and youtube. Stuff that Anderson Cooper will only imagine in his fevered dreams.