Where are the reporters?

This week there was a symposium on Computation and Journalism at Georgia Tech, and I've enjoyed the reporting from it by Knoxville's Jack Lail. Today he points to a Column by Rich Gordon summarizing the discussions there. I was struck by a comment on Gordon's piece by Dan Keating, who says

i read through the list of panelists and one job title was missing: reporter. lots of directors and vice presidents. no reporters. this week is the national computer-assisted reporting conference in houston
http://www.ire.org/training/houston08/
where lots of industry-leading reporters will be speaking about how they use computation for gathering and analyzing information...

(Also discussed on Lail's blog: Link Journalism, with a link to discussion on Mindy McAdams' blog.)