You don't have to work in a field to be familiar with its problems. You can also be a user. But one way or another, you should understand the problems well.
I would agree with you on this one. I've never worked with news publishers before but we wanted to explore how the need for distribution affected news quality and what all we could do to extrapolate from there. Ended up spending a lot of time with a fairly large newspaper and iterating on ideas to finally arrive at personalisation as a solution. We got away with a product we could evolve, revenue and lots of insider information about how the publishing industry works. And, everyone knows everyone else, so they referred us to a ton of others too! :D
But magic happens if you are the user as well as have some expertise in that area. Or at least someone on team with similar expertise. Linux was a baby similar chemical reaction only.