Outsourcing Your Local News
This just in. A news website in California is recruiting reporters in India for its local news coverage. Because Pasadena’s city council meetings are available on the web, PasadenaNews.com believes journalists in India can report on the local government as well as a local reporter who attends the meeting.
This is just the latest facet of the outsourcing trend. English is the global language of business, and many of the world’s most privileged students study in the US and Britain. Just as automotive engineering jobs and computer programming jobs are moving overseas, now the reporter on the scene may be halfway around the world.
From Alternet:
So no one really complained when the back office and call center jobs migrated to India in the nineties: Who needed them? We would still be the brains of global business. When the IT jobs started drifting away, we were at first assured that only the more “routine” ones were outsourceable. As for all the laid-off techies, they were smart enough to develop new skills, right?
But no one can pretend any longer that we have a global monopoly on intellect and innovation. Look at the “telemedicine” trend, which has radiologists in India and Lebanon reading CT scans for hospitals in Altoona and Chicago. Or — and this was never supposed to happen — the growing outsourcing of R&D, with scores of companies opening labs in India or China — “Chindia,” as they are known in the biz lit. In 2005, a Microsoft manager told the Financial Times that “The question is how you make [the Chinese] truly creative, truly innovative.” Whoops — weren’t we supposed to be the innovators?
The residents of Pasadena will now get a sanitized report of their city council meetings viewed through the lense of Indian culture. But could this work in Detroit? Could you imagine a journalist in China recounting a school board meeting where a local activist is hauled away and charged with assault for throwing grapes at school board members?
