Published January 16, 2008 04:46 pm - Column: Outsourcing newsroom duties to India seems like a foreign idea, but it is under study in the United States as a way to cut costs.It may be inevitable in the transformational world that newspapers find themselves facing today. Still, it is shocking to know the Bengal tiger’s nose is now under the newsroom door.
No less a newspaper than the mighty Miami Herald, winner of 19 Pulitzer Prizes, has acknowledged it considered outsourcing newsroom duties to India in order to save money.
It rejected the idea. Yet the mere thought of such a respected paper farming out local journalism to a distant land had to send chills through newsrooms across the country.
And what did the poohbahs at the Miami Herald consider might get done as well – and cheaper – 8,500 miles from southern Florida?
Copyediting of the paper’s community section – you know, those weekly little news listings and stories about births, reunions, community services, volunteer programs, Little League tryouts.
And design tasks associated with the section.
For the uninitiated, copyediting involves, among other things, checking stories for style, spelling, grammatical glitches, punctuation, taste, clarity and accuracy. You need to know your Strunk and White as well as local names and locations.
Design duties are more technical. They involve twisting and turning images and text on a computer screen to build newspaper pages that inform and attract readers. A sense of place is important to putting out content that connects. It could be a stretch for designers sitting in New Delhi.
http://www.alliednews.com/statenews/cnhinsall_story_016164610.html
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