There are rare exceptions, of course, but they are rare for clear reasons; Susie Cagle has been covering Occupy Oakland since the very beginning, because she’s an Oakland based reporter and because she wanted to. As a result, she has the deepest and most complete and most contextually rich version of the event. But no one has paid her consistently to do this, and that’s exactly the point: because the NYT (and even the Oakland Tribune) can weave together a story from OPD press releases and quotes from twitter, why should they pay someone to, you know, actually be informed about what’s happened? When Susie wrote her story, she didn’t know if she’d have anyone to pay her for writing it (whereas all the paid journalists who would write stories about what happened were either absent or had their eyes closed).