I'd like to know what each of these staff actually did before saying whether it was necessary or unnecessary to send them though. The amount of detail available is so sparse that is strikes me as very difficult to condemn the organisation for sending too many staff to events on the basis of what we know.
The Dale Farm coverage doesn't look good on the face of it, but there are two points to consider there. First, the Daily Telegraph, like all right wing newspapers is more heavily biased against the BBC. Second, the devil is in the detail. A documentary team would be independent of a live reporting team, so I wouldn't count that. What does seem odd is to have a local and national reporting team there, when they could easily have had the local team report for national and local services.