Deep Currents

Here’s an interesting new model for producing news in a sputtering economy and a dying industry: do the writing in India. This does not bode well for American journalists. (Then again, not much does.) That’s what this guy did to streamline his local Pasadena paper:

He fired his seven Pasadena staffers — including five reporters — who were making $600 to $800 a week, and now he and his wife direct six employees all over India on how to write news and features, using telephones, e-mail, press releases, Web harvesting and live video streaming from a cellphone at City Hall.

“I pay per piece, just the way it was in the garment business,” he says. “A thousand words pays $7.50.”

This is the most revolutionary idea I’ve heard in news since I saw David Cohn’s new start-up spot.us, which is pioneering a community-funded model for local reporting. It’ll be interesting to see how well this works. Clearly quite a bit of reporting can be done from afar. As with any matter of outsourcing, the real question is: what can’t be done from India?

Written: December 3rd, 2008