That is exactly what he means. It is considered a massive violation of journalistic ethics (yeah yeah, oxymoron, I know) to file a story with a dateline from somewhere other than where you wrote the article. It doesn't matter if the entire story takes place in northern Quebec; if you never leave your desk in Manhattan to write it, the dateline is NEW YORK. (Of course, in such cases most news organizations will just dispense with the dateline altogether. But it makes The New York Times (and all other papers) look cool and powerful and more relevant to have datelines from all over the country and all over the world, especially stories that run on page one, as this one did. It's more than worth it for them to give the writer the couple of hundred bucks for a quick plane ride from New Orleans over to Florida for this purpose.
"Month after month, year after year, Rick Bragg said, his mission was to "go get the dateline," even when that meant leaning heavily on the reporting of others."
The wording of that makes it sound like 'getting the dateline' makes it more neccesary to rely on a stringer, not less.
Or maybe it isn't just Kurtz. Bragg doesn't make much sense here (to me anyway): "I have dictated stories from an airport after writing the story out in longhand on the plane that I got from phone interviews..."
Probably he means that he traveled to a town only to get a phone interview. But why call work from the airport when you're already home?? I mean, this is after he's visited the 'dateline' town, right?
What I'm suggesting here is that this is the over-complexity of a prevaricator.