Watch Out, Joe Klein…

The reporters are being outsourced to India…. are the pundits next?

On the news beat in Mumbai, California

· US website recruits reporters living in India
· Journalists cover council meetings via internet

Dan Glaister in Los Angeles
Saturday May 12, 2007
The Guardian

It is a story destined to chill the soul of even the most diligent and productive of journalists. A news website in Pasadena, California, has recruited a pair of reporters who will be expected to write one or two 500 word stories each day detailing the business of the local council, as well as two in-depth pieces each week.

They do not need to come into the office. In fact, it is unlikely they will visit the office, meet their editor or even see Pasadena. The two new recruits to PasadenaNow.com are based 7,979 miles away in India, one in Bangalore, one in Mumbai.

“This is a revolutionary idea,” said James Macpherson, the website’s editor. “A few of the people who applied for these posts got the idea and see themselves as revolutionaries at the frontier.”

Unsurprisingly, Macpherson recruited his cub reporters through the internet. “We seek a newspaper journalist based in India to report on the city government and political scene of Pasadena, California, USA,” said the posting placed on an equivalent of Craigslist earlier this week.

“We do not believe that geographic distance between India and California will present unsurmountable problems, and that working together with you will result in you developing a keen working knowledge of this city’s affairs. This will result in accurate and authoritative reports.”

The two reporters, who will watch council proceedings live on the internet, come cheap by Californian standards: the Mumbai post will attract $12,000 (£6,000), the one in Bangalore, $7,200.

For Macpherson recruiting in India was an obvious solution to his staffing problems. “I’ve had unfortunate experiences with low-cost articles,” he said. Interns and students, “are extremely demanding and produce inferior work.”

[…]

Macpherson is not the first to outsource writing. Reuters news agency has a staff of 1,000 in Bangalore, including 100 journalists writing financial news stories. The Boston Globe also recently announced some jobs would be outsourced to India. But this is the first time that a reporting brief has been handed to journalists on the other side of the world.

[…]

“I have been unable to find anyone to work for me who will sit through them to the very end,” he admitted. “No matter how much I offer them. A lot of work in the US is done by aliens because Americans won’t do it. This is just the same as that.”
More..

Americans won’t do the shitwork of reporting because on the one hand students and interns have been suckered into seeing journalism as showbiz and themselves as potential stars, above the tedium and mediocrity of actual boring reporting. They see the pampered DC pundits like Joe Klein and David Broder and they think that’s what journalism is, getting paid for ponitificating and socialising with bigwigs.

On the other hand, many media enterprises treat students like unpaid labour, expecting them to support themselves during internships and then complaining when the students actually expect something in return for their toil.

There’s also a huge mismatch between expectations: media outlets need reporters, whereas students want to be Journalists. Where you could’ve become a reporter straight from school, Journalism is a profession, not an icky, common trade.. Journalism is for the privileged: reporting’s for the oiks,

It’s because of this and the necessity for a private income to support you that journalism is closed to many potential talented reporters who just can’t afford to fund themselves through graduate school and internships – but try getting a job without a journalism qualification – and so it’s the well-off, well-heeled and connected, entitled types who can afford to enter journalism. Which leads us right back to Klein and Broder and their cocktail party punditry again.

It’s a self-perpuating, closed system and even if on the whole I consider outsourcing to be a Bad Thing, in this instance it may actually prove useful in helping, with the explosion of blogging, to break the monopoly of privilege that has a grip on the US western media.