Unless it doesn’t.

Western news organizations tolerate, as opposed to prefer, “local hires” because they are affordable; they have certain skill sets --language, mostly, and hard-won experience on the ground—that their own home-grown staff do not; and they have access to areas that are hostile or inaccessible to outsiders.

The whole concept of a “foreign correspondent” was for decades based on the idea that we send one of “ours” over “there.” The fact of his or her “otherness,” it was long felt, would only enhance the reporting—they would presumably have the skills to tell the country’s story, but keep a critical distance by dint of their “foreignness” and thus tell their story more objectively and dispassionately than a local hire could be expected to. In fact, it was seen as an occupational hazard were a reporter to “go native.”

Ron, you are suggesting a different model—a globalized newspaper, that instead of sending its own staff overseas outsources its reporting to “local hires.” I’m not sure I see the difference between that and merely carrying dispatches from other foreign news outlets. Why shouldn’t the Times just close its Israel bureau and translate articles from Maariv or Haaretz in some sort of reciprocal arrangement? It would be cheaper, and certainly the average Israeli native reporter has more “essential insights” into the region than a guy who has been imported from outside, even if that guy was there for a number of years.

If media had infinite means and universal access to hotspots, they would certainly eschew the whole notion of local hires, and prefer instead to dispatch correspondents who were hired, trained and promoted according to the same standards of its local and national staffs. Local hires are a capitulation to reality, not a journalistic ideal by any means.

In the case of the TImes bureau chief, I don’t think you have to be a “savage partisan,” to use Bill Keller’s phrase, to worry that a transplanted American reporter who has become fully integrated into a society might be in danger of losing his or her critical distance. Or to suggest that local hires may not be the ideal way to cover a conflict.