toe-touch n.— «When a correspondent travels, it should be to report for the newspaper. If deadline constraints mean that the reporter will make no significant contribution to someone else;s work, we should skip the trip—the “toe...
toe-touch n. a trip taken by a reporter merely to acquire the proper dateline on a story, even though all reporting is done somewhere else or by someone else. (source: Double-Tongued Dictionary)
toe-touch n.— «You talk a lot about the practice back then of the ‘toe-touch’—someone reporting a story from their home desk and then traveling only briefly to the city where the story is set just to ‘get the dateline.’ You say editors...
toe-touch n.— «Visiting a scene just long enough to claim a dateline for an article based on somebody else’s uncredited reporting—let’s call it a “dateline toe-touch”—may not be as egregious as writing stories datelined...