I'll have the Pasadena Pasanda please...and a large glass of outrage
There sure has been a lot of sarcastic comment over the past fortnight about PasadenaNow.com's decision to outsource local government coverage to India. It's one of those stories that is such a perfect storm of zeitgeist, geography and journalism that it's too easy to take the direct and short route to an instant laugh. (note to editor: please insert call-center joke of your choosing here). But what if it's actually a good idea that improves the flow of local information and benefits readers?
The prize for the least insight on this one goes to Steve Johnson of the Chicago Tribune, whose blog on the subject implies that the move is only one small rung up the ladder from depending on "citizen journalists", whom he plainly despises. You're right, Steve. Apart from the Indian journalists being trained, employed by the medium they supply, directed by a desk and having no potential hidden personal interests in the stories they write, they are exactly like citizen journalists. Wow, this sarcasm thing is contagious.
Also joining the fray was Barbara Ehrenreich who did at least mention that one of the proposed employees was a graduate of UC Berkeley's post-grad journalism course. Barbara is very concerned that she herself may now be threatened with outsourcing and she mounts a belated appeal against a trend that she now believes has destroyed good American jobs since the 1980s whilst merely offering the false promise of better ones. It's certainly a theory so I decided to check it out. Fortunately the Bureau Of Labor Statistics keeps the score on this one. The average monthly national rate of unemployment in 1980 was 7.1%. In 2006 it was 4.6%. The US labor force in 1980 was 99 million. In 2006 it was 144 million. Since 1986 the unemployment rate has only been higher than its 1980 rate once. The average for the whole 1980s was 6.7%. The median four-person family income in 2003 was $65,093. In 1980 it was $24,332 in current dollars. Can someone find a current dollar to buy Barbara a Made-in-India calculator so she can allow the cleansing light of fact to probe her opinion.
Don't get me wrong. I don't think outsourcing journalism is ideal. I just don't think it's right to assume it is a disaster for journalism before you've seen how it works.
Outside of the "shock-bloggers" there was still plenty of negative vibe from people who genuinely care about journalism. Crudely summed up, this is what they say. They argue that reporting from that distance allows no room for interaction with the politics and politicians of an area and that outsourcing of journalism is the thin end of a wedge which will lead to cost-cutting media organizations chasing after cheaper but inferior journalism and harming the relationship of a newspaper or website with its community.
And at first it does seem ridiculous to imagine that someone could really get a feel for local politics in Pasadena while living in Uttar Pradesh. But if you stop for a second I think there's a deliberate misunderstanding required to make that statement and ultimately a very inward-looking fear.
I guess that the Indian journalists in question are being hired to produce the straight reporting of public proceedings that are the bread and butter of any local newspaper or website. I've covered them in the UK. They aren't usually very interesting but they absolutely have to be covered well and a smart desk can pick out the stuff that sounds interesting or wrong or both and get some good stories. In my day they were covered by the 16-year-old kids who had just started at the paper because no one else wanted to do them.
Can an Indian journalist with an internet link on his desk do as good a reporting job as a junior American journalist in the council chamber? I don't really see why not. At this level of journalism you need to be able to see and hear what's said accurately and report it diligently and accessibly. Or at least well enough for a copy editor to knock it into shape. You can only, in my view, regard this as a threat to good journalism if you have no knowledge of the standards of journalism historically applied at this level.
But whether it works or not, the instant bile that greeted this idea really highlights one of the reasons it is so hard to innovate in newspapers. Innovative ideas are never obvious and without risk. If they were, then everyone would be doing them already. Sometimes you need to be prepared to see how something works before you decide that it doesn't, in fact, work. But the environment around journalism - conservative, inward looking, opinionated, occasionally self-important - is highly toxic for those people and companies who want to find new ways of doing things better for readers. It kills new unusual ideas before they even have a chance to fail of their own accord. And that environment is more worrying for those of us who love newspapers than whether or not a guy in Mumbai can knock together a story about street lighting in Pasadena from an internet feed.
The prize for the least insight on this one goes to Steve Johnson of the Chicago Tribune, whose blog on the subject implies that the move is only one small rung up the ladder from depending on "citizen journalists", whom he plainly despises. You're right, Steve. Apart from the Indian journalists being trained, employed by the medium they supply, directed by a desk and having no potential hidden personal interests in the stories they write, they are exactly like citizen journalists. Wow, this sarcasm thing is contagious.
Also joining the fray was Barbara Ehrenreich who did at least mention that one of the proposed employees was a graduate of UC Berkeley's post-grad journalism course. Barbara is very concerned that she herself may now be threatened with outsourcing and she mounts a belated appeal against a trend that she now believes has destroyed good American jobs since the 1980s whilst merely offering the false promise of better ones. It's certainly a theory so I decided to check it out. Fortunately the Bureau Of Labor Statistics keeps the score on this one. The average monthly national rate of unemployment in 1980 was 7.1%. In 2006 it was 4.6%. The US labor force in 1980 was 99 million. In 2006 it was 144 million. Since 1986 the unemployment rate has only been higher than its 1980 rate once. The average for the whole 1980s was 6.7%. The median four-person family income in 2003 was $65,093. In 1980 it was $24,332 in current dollars. Can someone find a current dollar to buy Barbara a Made-in-India calculator so she can allow the cleansing light of fact to probe her opinion.
Don't get me wrong. I don't think outsourcing journalism is ideal. I just don't think it's right to assume it is a disaster for journalism before you've seen how it works.
Outside of the "shock-bloggers" there was still plenty of negative vibe from people who genuinely care about journalism. Crudely summed up, this is what they say. They argue that reporting from that distance allows no room for interaction with the politics and politicians of an area and that outsourcing of journalism is the thin end of a wedge which will lead to cost-cutting media organizations chasing after cheaper but inferior journalism and harming the relationship of a newspaper or website with its community.
And at first it does seem ridiculous to imagine that someone could really get a feel for local politics in Pasadena while living in Uttar Pradesh. But if you stop for a second I think there's a deliberate misunderstanding required to make that statement and ultimately a very inward-looking fear.
I guess that the Indian journalists in question are being hired to produce the straight reporting of public proceedings that are the bread and butter of any local newspaper or website. I've covered them in the UK. They aren't usually very interesting but they absolutely have to be covered well and a smart desk can pick out the stuff that sounds interesting or wrong or both and get some good stories. In my day they were covered by the 16-year-old kids who had just started at the paper because no one else wanted to do them.
Can an Indian journalist with an internet link on his desk do as good a reporting job as a junior American journalist in the council chamber? I don't really see why not. At this level of journalism you need to be able to see and hear what's said accurately and report it diligently and accessibly. Or at least well enough for a copy editor to knock it into shape. You can only, in my view, regard this as a threat to good journalism if you have no knowledge of the standards of journalism historically applied at this level.
But whether it works or not, the instant bile that greeted this idea really highlights one of the reasons it is so hard to innovate in newspapers. Innovative ideas are never obvious and without risk. If they were, then everyone would be doing them already. Sometimes you need to be prepared to see how something works before you decide that it doesn't, in fact, work. But the environment around journalism - conservative, inward looking, opinionated, occasionally self-important - is highly toxic for those people and companies who want to find new ways of doing things better for readers. It kills new unusual ideas before they even have a chance to fail of their own accord. And that environment is more worrying for those of us who love newspapers than whether or not a guy in Mumbai can knock together a story about street lighting in Pasadena from an internet feed.
I, too, was surprised (OK. Not really.) that this broke through to the level of late-night sarcasm. As a Reuters alum I know a thing or two about the business end (pun intended) of outsourcing and offshoring and I still think pasadenanow.com is being darned innovative. But it doesn't matter what I or anybody thinks: this will work, or it won't. His readers will tell him, and the verdict will come soon enough.
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