I'm really surprised that people are being so petty, given the huge task for ANY media organisation to keep an updated library of images or video. And sometimes it's worth sending a crew to a location and sometimes it isn't (or it depends on where your limited staff resources are at any given time). It's also quite acceptable to, say, have a reporter at any train station to talk about rail issues if the actual location isn't critical.
The costs would be huge to keep updating the pictures for every time rolling stock is cascaded, or given a new livery. Imagine seeing a video of your local high street and sitting there going 'that shop closed down weeks ago. It's a Subway now.'. As if anyone else would care, unless the story was about a particular store that was, or wasn't, featured.
Then, as I know only too well, there's the issue of needing to publish a story that's topical and not having a good image. You can't just go and steal an image from a Google search, and even the many picture libraries can be hard to get images from, as well as being expensive (and does the tax payer want to fund paying someone for an updated image of a train?). At some point, you either pick anything or you go without a picture - and the latter is rarely considered acceptable unless you're going to use a 'BREAKING NEWS' image instead.
My local paper seems to cope by showing pictures with vague descriptions, such as 'Herts Police Car' or 'A train'. Which does the job. They do at least have pictures of FCC trains, so get local rail stories correct nearly all the time!
The BBC will employ a lot of people on a picture desk, but I am sure that getting photos of trains is a pretty low priority, just as it will be for lots of other things that you might not notice because you're not so interested in it.
I spot things about technology all the time, but it doesn't bother me.
