In 2008 I worked in News Production for a local television station. There are two examples that come to mind to show how shallowly they train journalists.
First, there was NASA, they were doing testing of new lunar rover they planned to send back to the moon in a city a little over an hour and a half away. I brought it to the attention of our news department who quickly chided me with “isn’t that outside our coverage area?” as if we didn’t have a website that broadcasted to the whole planet, technically. Well, we only got coverage because me and another guy from Production called the NASA press corps and got an invitation for our news station. We went to the news manager and they sent someone out, but we never got any video online. For the next week, still photos from the test were the top story on WIRED’s website for over a week. We could have had that traffic, but nope. “Outside our coverage area.”
Another time was when there was a scandal with an official running for office. It was the governors race, and weeks before the vote, a new case was dropping that was showing one of the two candidates for governor getting illegal funding for his campaign. I went to the site of the prosecutor, downloaded all the relevant data, and put it on journalists desks. I got asked by the Producer “Are you sure this is true? I didn’t see anything on AP Newswire.” Jesus tittyfucking Christ I guess these people had never heard of BREAKING A FUCKING STORY before. We ended up running it after about ten different State papers ran stories about it, because apparently it’s not news unless someone else reported on it first and you just do a copy-paste job from AP Newswire.