I guess I see your point. Reporters should only do stories that fall squarely in their laps. Their time is valuable, after all, and how important can a story be if they have to chase it down.
All the real important stories come over the wire anyway, so there's no need to ever leave the office. Most of the time there's not even a need to rewrite the wire copy.
The best stories write themselves, or rather, are written by someone else!
Oh, trust me, this'll get written about; this is just too good of a story to not be written.
But I need to line up the Max Amann of the Andyites to publish the book.