The answer, clearly, will depend on a variety of circumstances. There have always been arguments in journalism about the wisdom of keeping a reporter on the same beat for years on end. Every newsroom has its tale of the police reporter who, but for a gun and a shield, has become a cop. And indeed our journalistic forebears were regularly rotated out of war zones. On the other hand, there is no shortage of tales about what happens to coverage when the turnover is so rapid that the newcomer doesn't have a clue.
Experience can result in increasingly penetrating coverage -or in cynicism, boredom, fossilization.
Newhouse Newspapers' bureau chief Deborah Howell believes that reporters should be judged individually, without set term limits. The Wall Street Journal 's Al Hunt, too, eschews hard and fast rules on rotations, and prefers the practice of having correspondents switch beats. This way, he says, you can still have the advantage of a reporter's institutional memory and maybe slow down the onset of terminal worldweariness. I was following their agenda. I'm starting to like Newt Gingrich.