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Covering Pasadena, California, From India? And Why Not?

For those who thought silly our idea of starting a new global news agency covering all of the world’s news via the Internet from a country where labor and communications costs are very low, apparently it’s not such a bad idea after all.

Take the Pasadena Now website in California. It needs to cover Pasadena city council meetings. Those council meetings are webcast. So instead of attending the council meetings the editor and publisher of the web site figures he can have two journalists in an office provide just as good coverage from that webcast.

Come to think of it, those journalists don’t actually need to be in Pasadena, or in California, or in the US for that matter. Why not hire a couple of journalists in India to do the job? Why not, indeed!

James Macpherson says he has done exactly that. One will get $12,000 annually, the other $7,200. One of them had attended the University Of California Berkeley Graduate School Of Journalism.

Competitors scoff saying that journalists sitting in India won’t get the feel and culture of Pasadena via the web. Maybe so, but it will be journalism on the cheap and the question boils down to “Good Enough”? – May 14, 2007

Keywords:outsourcing,US newspapers

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