IT PAYS TO SPEND MONEY

By Chris Daly

Here is a fine piece in The Washington Post praising the amazing performance of two NPR reporters in China during the recent quake. Melissa Block and Robert Siegel deserve the praise -- their reports have been outstanding.

I would make one additional point: Reading between the lines of the Post piece, you can see that long before the quake, NPR had sent the two reporters as part of a team of nine (9!) to just go to China for a broader story. That's why they were in the vicinity -- because a serious news operation was spending the money to send them there in the first place.

It was that investment in news coverage that paid these dividends.