Does Reuters Read THE NEW YORK TIMES?

This morning Peter Graff filed a story for Reuters about the Human Terrain Team (HTT) program, which, as he writes, "embeds anthropologists with combat brigades in Iraq and Afghanistan in the hope of helping tactical commanders in the field understand local cultures." This might well be of interest to those following the war news were it not an account pretty much identical to the one that David Rohde filed from Afghanistan last October for The New York Times. The good news is that Graff did as good a job as Rohde did in reviewing both the positive and the negative sides of the whole HTT strategy, but the bad news is obvious. What took Reuters so long to decide that this was worth reporting? This is not the first time that I have raised the "This is News?" question after reading a Reuters report. I suppose that crack on The Wire about wanting to work for "a real newspaper" is just as valid for wire services!