Really bad idea alert!
Michael Kelly in the NY Post reveals Where the media meet the military:

THE U.S. States armed forces will soon discover if it is possible to successfully place about 500 journalists in military units (down to the company level) going into war. This experiment in what the military calls "embedding" entails grafting what amounts to a presidential-campaign-sized press corps onto an army in combat. The question of whether this is going to work, or implode, is a matter of much conversation among the involved parties here.
...
They were talking about what was going to happen in a basic situation of war reporting: A firefight, say, occurs at Point A, and cameramen and photographers rush to Points B through Z to cover it.

Under the rules of embedment, this is not supposed to happen. Each cameramen and photographer, just as each reporter, is to be assigned to a specific unit, and is supposed to stay with that unit unless permitted to leave. (And none of the embedded journalists is permitted a vehicle, so as to enable them to run off to Point A from B through Z.) In embedment theory, the cameraman attached to the unit engaged in the firefight is supposed to get the picture, and everyone not attached to that unit is supposed to stay where they belong and not get the picture.

Unless the Iraq campaign is really fast, some of the newshawks are going to get killed and take some troops with them.

In the first Gulf War, the U.S. military, in collaboration with the major U.S. media companies, built a system that was designed to sharply limit direct observational reporting to a relative few journalists, overwhelmingly drawn from the ranks of big media. The permitted few were to file "pool" reports and pictures that would be made available to all media through a military clearing process.

Sounds OK to me - this isn't a picnic.

The experiment - "the huge experiment," as Blumenfeld says - this time represents an admirable attempt to do much better. A system that allows eyewitness reporting across the spectrum of conflict, no matter how constrained, has to produce a picture of war, and of the military that goes to war, more true and complete than a system that seeks to deny eyewitness reporting.

Somehow, I think the miltary objectives are rather more important than getting every reporter and photographer their own personal live action story.

The Defense Department ground rules for embedding speak of the imperative "to tell the factual story, good or bad." For the sake of that great goal, I hope the Pentagon thinks more about loosening things up a bit. ... As any White House press secretary can tell them, there is no hell quite so annoying as the hell of an infantilized media pack.

I'm supposed to care?