Outsourcing the news

James Macpherson’s Web site PasadenaNow.com offers thousands of local stories about Pasadena, Calif., written by reporters in India.

This, Macpherson says, is the future of journalism.

MediaNews Group, which owns 54 daily newspapers, is considering outsourcing preproduction and layout offshore, according to a Nov. 29 column in the New York Times.

The Orange County Register began outsourcing some of their copy editing to India this summer.

India offers cheap labor, but this is not the future of journalism; it is the future of menial information tasks.

With the rise of the Internet, we are indeed living in a globalized world, and the currency in this economy is knowledge.

America has since shifted from an industrial economy to a service economy. Anyone can stand by an assembly line putting parts together, so why not outsource it overseas?

Outsourcing has long been a part of the industrial economy, but only recently has it become a part of the information economy. With the Internet, we can send files and information back and forth in ways we couldn’t do before.

You don’t need to be in Pasadena to report on Pasadena. You can view press releases online, interview people over telephone and e-mail and converse with your editor in Pasadena about what to write.

Then you can write an article for a fraction of the cost that an American would write it for.

The National Writers Union reports small circulation newspaper writers were paid $11 per 100 words in 1999. Today, Macpherson is able to hire writers for $0.75 per 100 words.

The reason for this is the incredibly low cost of living in India. According to Michael Moe’s book, “Finding the Next Starbucks,” a maid for a day in India costs $0.30. In America, one would cost $75. Workers of similar skill level cost four times less in India on average.

Still, how can a reporter in India be able to write an interesting article without having the context and detail that comes from living in Pasadena?

Their stories do lose a little bit, but when it comes to local news, it doesn’t really matter because most of the stories are about a holiday lighting ceremony or the 2009 Doo Dah Parade.

But, when it comes to real stories, you have to be there to report well.

In one story on Pasadena Now, Police Chief Bernard Melekian dismissed what he said would be a “serious case of police misconduct” if true by saying it “probably didn’t happen.”

As far as I could tell, the allegations of misconduct, brought forth by the ACLU, stemmed from an alleged incident in which the police “illegally questioned a juvenile about a crime.”

So much detail.

Well, the police aren’t going to issue a press release saying they committed misconduct, and the ACLU isn’t going to admit to lying, so what you have is two sides against each other. You need a reporter to find out what really happened.

The real news is never going to be outsourced.