A friend of mine who’s an editor at the New York Times said those results don’t surprise him at all. “If you watch a White House press conference,” he said, “you can tell who the new reporters are. They’re often the ones who ask the best questions.” I must have looked a little surprised. “Seriously,” he said. “I actually think we should rotate reporters’ beats every two years, so nobody ever thinks they’re too much of an expert at anything.”
It’s an interesting idea. There’s some advantage to having good background in a subject, of course. For one thing, it takes a lot less time to research and write a story if you at least know the general subject matter and have tracked news developments in it over a period of time. And while an expert can miss information because they assume they already know what there is to know, a newcomer can miss information from not knowing enough to know what there is to ask.
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