Outsourcing Everything
By Russ Heitz
For those of you who may have missed it, a Maureen Dowd column in the New York Times illustrated once again the inevitable encroachment of globalization. This time it is local newspapers that are taking the plunge.
James Macpherson, publisher of a local California newspaper called Pasadena Now, recently fired seven members of his Pasadena staff, which included five reporters, and replaced them with a handful of non-journalists who live in India. The reason? The reporters were being paid $600 to $800 dollars a week. The non-journalists in India will do the same work for less for a whole lot less.
There’s no need for overhead expenses either, like health benefits, merit raises, workshop training, etc. Macpherson simply buys his articles one at a time.
“I pay per piece, just the way it was in the garment business,” he says. “A thousand words pays $7.50.” For those who don’t have a calculator nearby, that comes out to .0075 cents per word. As a comparison, that is considerably less than science fiction magazines fifty years ago were paying for novellas about interplanetary space travel, green-skinned monsters, and a cock-eyed concept called Global Warming.
How do non-journalists in India report on local events going on in Pasadena, California? By using today’s electronic gadgetry: email, cell phones, web surfing, and internet videos of local town hall meetings. Although Macpherson admits sometimes something is lost in multi-continent translations. One of his Indian non-journalists, for example, thought the Rose Bowl was some kind of gastronomic delight, rather than a football game. But hey, who cares about trivia, right?
Click on this: next column
It would be nice to think Macphearson’s idea is just a nutty experiment by one small-time publisher. Unfortunately, it’s more like a warning about the future. A guy named Dean Singleton, who just happens to be the head of a newspaper conglomerate that includes daily newspapers such as The Denver Post, The Detroit News, and The Pasadena Star-News, is also looking into the possibility of outsourcing every aspect of publishing, including possibly having one news desk for all of his papers, “maybe even offshore,” he says.
Shocking? Sure, but not surprising. Everything else is being globalized, why not local newspapers.
If you want to read Maureen Dowd’s entire column go to www.nytimes.com/2008/11/30/opinion/30dowd.html?
|
|
Russ lives in Sarasota, Florida with his wife. He is a graduated from Temple University in Philadelphia with a degree in psychology and has been writing most of his life. His new suspense novel, "Crosshairs", is available through all the major bookstore chains in the US and UK, as well as on Amazon. Russ's website: www.russheitz.com |
|
Thanks Russ for the article... John Wolf
