In a piece that offers some advice to the New York Times on their Iraq reporting, the Boston Herald's Jules Crittenden makes some observations about reporters and the staffing of some major metropolitan papers.

No less than four reporters worked on this article. That looks like about one phone call each. Most of what I’ve described here is a day’s work. Again, I hate to tell NYT its business. Self-important overstaffed broadsheets have their own way of operating, which typically involves a lot of people not doing much. The result is that they often miss the story. Tabloids, usually the second, understaffed newspapers in town, are forced to do more with less. I can’t tell you how many times we’ve thrown one or two reporters at a story on which our competition had dispatched three, four, five or more, and still we kicked their asses. It’s a complacency problem. As a J instructor explained to me many, many years ago, there is nothing like one scared reporter. Three, four, five don’t feel sufficient pressure. Complacency is compounded when newspapers do not feel themselves to be in real competition, and editors feel themselves more accountable to political agendas and factions than they do to their readers or to any kind of professional standards.

What he said.