Sometimes you just have to be there

In the blizzard of criticism of the wavering accuracy of journalism in a report-first, double-check later era, it's easy to overlook a related aspect of coverage of the Boston bombs – the value of physically being there.

Journalists at desks thousands of miles away could and did marshal the information flowing from official sources. But for news organisations that want to claim the superior tag “content producer” with conviction, such practices are ideally just a baseline in their approach to big stories.

It seems obvious that when “city in lockdown” headlines abound, it helps to have a reporter in situ gaining first-hand experience of what it means to find yourself within a city under “lockdown”.

And to be fair, most on-the-scene journalists do significantly better with verbal shorthands than the CNN correspondent who described the mood at the Watertown siege as "eerie. It's as though a bomb dropped somewhere", which as The Daily Show 's Jon Stewart pointed out is "not so much a metaphor, as what actually happened".

Employing a Washington correspondent (Simon Carswell, who was one of two Irish Times reporters in Boston last week) meant this newspaper could augment its coverage with reportage from the streets, offices, bars and sports stadiums of Boston. Quotes such as "if they picked a city to scare, they picked the wrong city" that echo the White House response are all the more powerful when sourced from ordinary citizens. Foreign coverage has long been a means by which news groups can differentiate their product. But having reporters at the site of a major international story, whether they are permanently based nearby or hastily flown in, eats news budgets.

Acknowledging a tweet from a viewer that RTÉ could have bought in reports from local Boston services for less than the cost of sending reporter Cian McCormack there last week, RTÉ news and current affairs director Kevin Bakhurst responded that he still believed "in first-hand reporting/journalism on major stories where possible".

So which stories qualify as “major” and therefore deserving of precious journalistic resources? In the case of Boston, the cultural links between the city and Ireland justified the attention from Irish media organisations even before factors such as the dramatic unfolding of the suspect shoot-out and the coincidence of there being another story of Irish interest (the murder charge against nanny Aisling Brady McCarthy) in town.

Last month, RTÉ's papal election coverage elicited scepticism from some viewers who felt ambivalent about the need to have Bryan Dobson and a massive basilica in the same frame. In total, RTÉ had a team of 16 people in Rome to cover the white smoke and related outbreak of pristine-clothed humility for television, radio and online. But it was a major story. This is not just a subjective assessment, but one proven by the response. Pope Francis's balcony debut attracted a peak audience of 992,000 to the extended Six-One bulletin – the highest peak for any RTÉ news programme since Enda Kenny's address to the nation in December 2011.

Still, the fact that hundreds of other journalists have descended upon a particular place isn’t always a good enough reason for “being there”.

In 2010, the rescue of 33 Chilean miners from a 69-day underground confinement had television companies such as the BBC scrambling to set up satellite links from some nearby rocks. It was a feelgood story (everyone survived) with a Hollywood feel (race against time). But dispatching a crew to a remote part of the Atacama desert, though ratings-friendly, was a costly exercise that added little real weight to a story of questionable national relevance.

It is a paradox of Western news values that once everyone else starts circling a story with cameras and notepads, the journalistic merit of joining in weakens.

"If I see groups of photographers, I'll essentially go the other way," conflict photographer Paul Conroy told a media conference in Dublin last year. Conroy was with Sunday Times journalist Marie Colvin when she was killed by shellfire in Baba Amr, Syria, in February 2012.

“Same with Marie, she hated bunches of reporters,” he said. “That’s why we ended up in Baba Amr – 8,000 people trying to get out, two people trying to get in.” During the artillery barrage from dawn to dusk, they “experienced a tiny amount of what these people had been through for months on end”.

It’s the purest form of reporting that exists; its substance the kind of news that without having someone there to record it would go unrecorded.