Ashley Gilbertson reports on the reporters:
Iraq has all but disappeared from the front pages. A study conducted earlier this year by the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press found that the war occupied just 3 percent of the mainstream media’s news hole. Compare that with 2003, when 9 out of 10 Americans said they were closely following the situation in Iraq—a higher percentage than were following any other topic—and there were, by some estimates, more than 1,000 Western reporters covering the conflict. There’s an ongoing chicken-and-egg debate about whether lack of interest has led to a decline in coverage or vice versa. For whatever reason, today there are only a few dozen Western reporters in Iraq, which is not many more than were there during Saddam Hussein’s last days in power, when staying in the country meant risking detention, or worse.
The Times is being whipsawed by the same economic woes battering the rest of the industry—earlier this year, the paper eliminated more than 100 editorial positions, which was about 8 percent of the newsroom’s total workforce. (So much for the suit of armor.) But unlike virtually every other news organization on the planet, it has not significantly cut back on the number of staff it has on the ground in Iraq, a commitment which costs upwards of $3 million a year. “You can’t cover a story only when interest peaks,” says Bill Keller, the paper’s executive editor. “You have to walk the beat all the time. This is so integral to what readers expect in The New York Times that if we stopped covering the war in Iraq we should just go out of business.”
The Dish 