“Instead of worrying that a job is being done by someone halfway overseas, we should be excited that technology and globalization are expanding the news business, so that even something like the Pasadena city council meeting can now be covered.”

Thing is I don’t see this as being a huge advancement from what is already being done in the media (note I say media instead of news because it’s all about ratings – even for news, but thats a side story). Technology and globalization is used currently in nearly all major events worldwide. The only difference here is that someone over seas is reporting on a local town instead of covering an over seas issue. I won’t get into the whole “outsourcing taking American jobs” debate, but I will say that I don’t see this as a real advancement at all.

What’s with all of the articles lately supporting and recommending outsourcing jobs and importing labor, written by people who ignore the obvious practical matters which make both economically disruptive short and long term?

So what about language subtleties? It will be required of course that the journalist in India be able to read, write, and speak english, but what about subtleties, sarcasm, and regional slang? One can’t expect someone in India to know all of the regionality information about an area in the US.

And before the negativity flies, yes, council members do use sarcasm, crack jokes, and make funnies on occasion. This is sometimes reported by journalists. I don’t want to see a “walk the dog” comment show up in a newspaper as “Councilman Joe went off on a random tangent about walking his dog in the middle of a conversation regarding school funding.”

The media and journalists have been generally uncritical and even supportive of outsourcing and the globalization trend in IT and other American industries.

In particlar I can recall a certain PBS talk show on outsourcing and globalization. The show focused on the Bush Administrations efforts to assist the U.S. Steel industry in the face of foreign competition. One member of the panel of talking heads on this program was a self-styled ‘liberal’ female journalist who nonetheless opposed the governments’ efforts as a form of protectionism. Additionally. she decried unrelated congressional attempts to stem IT outsourcing as further examples of protectionism which she was vehemently oppposed to. According to her, the only domestic workers worthy of government protection were coincidentally enough journalists. Indeed she provided a hypothetical scenario which such as in this story, although I think it was Canadian reporters who were outsourced. Of course, this struck me as extremely self-serving and outrageous.

As an outsourced IT worker, I can only say that this story provides me with a certain sense of satisfaction. I even wonder if the aforementioned woman is among the liberal journalists who are up in arms over this story. Ah, the irony.

Of course, if you own shares in a company that outsources and all that outsourcing makes you a tidy profit, you’d not really be complaining, right?

This sort of thinking is currently making America not so great as it used to be…

Americans need to decide if they are capitalist, international citizens of the world and to Hell with the entire United States and everything and everyone in it – or if they are loyal, caring Americans first and money grubbers second.

So far, it seems the wealthy choose the former and the poor choose the latter. This does not bode well for the future.

And BTW, the article above misrepresented Ms. Erenreich’s comparison of this labor outsourcing proposal to the eponomous Jason Blair.

Her point was that, if the subsequent articles were not attributed to the overseas reporters (read: transcribists), they risk the same distortions Mr. Blair brought to his “reporting”. Mr. Blair’s worst sin, that he made up quotes, is secondary in a way to the bare fact that he was never THERE, in physical presence at the live locations and times he said he was; but had only viewed it on a screen, and reported (possibly quite faithfully) what he saw on that screen.

So what? So as to that facet of his reporting, it’s fully appropriate to compare his method of “reporting” with that of the proposed sweatshop reporters. He wasn’t there, and neither would they be.

If, as is common practice with newspapers (I don’t know about the pasadenanow.com site), small articles don’t get bylines, there would be no ready way for readers to tell that the reporters saw everything through a relatively fixed lens; heard nothing but officially miked sound; that they had no idea of what was happening in the halls and streets outside the counsel chambers (protests, blocks-long lines of commenters, whatever)

If Pasadena Now were to publish the articles without disclosure of their remote-viewing source, they would indeed create the same assumption in the minds of the reader, that Mr. Blair created in the minds of his readers — namely, that the commentary was produced by someone who was in the location, and witnessed the events. Would you be satisfied with that sort of masquerade, or would you want to know the provenance of the commentary?

That was Ms. Erenreich’s point, as I took it. That’s why she asks, in her article, if they are going to but it under a Delhi byline when they publish it. I think that might affect how people take it, in the Valley.

I say it’s too bad the site put the plan on hold. It would have been fun to watch the fallout.