If Your Local Paper Has Suddenly Improved, Thank Bangalore...
JOURNOS working for the US print media are steaming with righteous indignation as their bosses start outsourcing their jobs to India.
Wait a minute....when a bunch of engineering and accounting jobs went there, it was a Good ThingTM!
The International Herald Tribune fumed that there was a sudden rush of advertisements on MonsterIndia.com for hacks to write for US and UK print media in Mumbai.
The article cites a WAN global survey of about 350 newspaper bosses in Europe, Asia and the United States. They expected outsourcing to increase, although few were willing to farm out all of their editorial functions. Part of the reason is that advertising revenues for print media is dropping and people are failing to buy hard copies of their news.
The article cites the outsourcing of the business pages of the UK's Daily Express to India as an example of what could happen in the US. The article mentions that much of the work being taken by India is the 'crap hack' work. Editors do not see the point of forcing hacks to churn out the Women's Institute results when they could be camped outside some b list celeb's house waiting to see who she is shagging this week.
However, the US print media, whose hacks are usually highly pretentious and not to mention over better paid than the rest of the world, are starting to panic that their gravy train could be hitting the buffers.
Guess we can expect an avalanche of "outsourcing is eeeeevilll" stories in the next few months.
Gone will be the days that they could wax lyrical about themselves for ten paragraphs before telling the news if an Indian turns out to be better at finding a better angle from Bangalore.
One could only hope. Getting lectured by my "betters" in the media when all I want to do is find out basic news without their "expert analysis" is a major reason I stopped buying papers in the first place.
Posted by: Swamp Blondie 2006-11-21 |