A California Web Publisher plan to outsource his site’s newswriting to India illustrates a too-common attitude infecting journalism today. Now people read the story of the news website publisher in the hometown of Pasadena, California who has outsourced their sites newswriting to India. The story blew across the Web yesterday and today. They dis a radio interview with the BBC about the late lat night. They think the story’s getting so much attention because it plays to the journalists fear that the global outsourcing epidemic that many of the people has been covering than a decade now threatens on their jobs. They believe that the attitude behind the outsourcing reflects so much of what is wrong with right practice of the journalism today.
In the Los Angeles Times this morning as the report said, James Macpherson placed an ad on an Indian version of the Craigslist looking for the journalist to write for their PasadenaNow websites. Macpherson plans to have the workers ti hires transcribe interviews, covers the webcast government meeting and a conduct interviews via e-mail. From the personal experience, the times reported that Macphersons site gets about 45,000 visitors a month. From the personal experience they know that it is tough to support a family that is much less hire employees on the income from the site with the traffic and that is assuming the 45,000 number reflects absolute unique visitors not an accumulation of the daily visits and that the number does not include spiders and automated agents.
To India, one can assume that is why Macpherson is looking. They see if the plans works. They have no doubt that they can find excellent and relatively inexpensive transcription services, stenographers and even the reporters from India. However, the journalism that the readers and advertisers will support requires much more than that. On the Macpherson while letting established news organization off the nook. The largest newspaper in the area, the Los Angeles TIme, does not cover Pasedena on a daily beat basis. The community at more than 140,000 merits a few features stories each week. The local newspaper, the pasadena star news is a part of a chain of a daily suburban papers owned by the Dean Singletons MediaNews. The results of the Star-News includes many stories from the other area communities MediaNews covers instead in focusing exclusively on the Pasadena. It seems like every time that they pick up a Start News if they find a slew of the reports from the Whitter a suburb 20 minutes south.
Indian contractors might crank out the copy but engaging the newswriting flows from the solid reporting. The reporter needs more points of contact with the community than the webcast meetings and an e-mail inbox to find the stories that a well-informed readership demands. Too many offline news publishers are following a similar model to Macphersons, the cut back investment in the local reporting, outsource news coverage and disengage from the community by relying on the low paid. , overworked reporters who cannot afford to live in the community that they are assigned to cover.
REFERENCE:
http://www.ojr.org/ojr/stories/070511niles/
