Media Newsletter

Outsourcing newspapers to India is offensive

Outsourcing to India is now an established business practice in USA and UK. But recently, the news that a Pulitzer Prize winning daily has started outsourcing its copy editing and page design to India has sparked off a debate in the US media. Here is an article by Dave Stancliff that appeared in The Eureka Reporter this week.

I almost got sick recently when I heard that a Pulitzer Prize-winning daily newspaper, The Orange County Register, was outsourcing copy editing and even page design for one of their community newspapers - to India!

American newspapers edited by another country are an outrage. I know what it's all about. Money. According to The Associated Press, Orange County Register Communications has been struggling with circulation declines in recent years.
The descent of The Orange County Register from third-largest newspaper in California to the fifth largest, began last year when they laid off 90 employees. The writing was on the wall in 2006 when they started offering a voluntary severance program.
I knew it was hard times for newspapers across the country, but I was shocked to find out that the outsourcing of our written word wasn't just confined to The Orange County Register.
On April 15, 2008, The McClatchy Co., owners of The Sacramento Bee, The Modesto Bee, and The Fresno Bee, announced voluntary buyouts to about 20 percent of the staff at The Modesto Bee, and three days later disclosed that they were outsourcing the advertising design department to India.
One reason the McClatchy Co. attributed to the drastic steps being taken was their ad revenue had been hard hit by the downturn in the housing market, according to an AP report last April. Another report, filed Feb. 4, by the AP regarding McClatchy's Miami Herald on outsourcing of copy editing, was later challenged by the McClatchy Co.
AP ran a correction on Feb. 5, which stated that, "The Associated Press erroneously reported that McClatchy Co. would outsource copy editing for The Miami Herald to India." What happened was they changed their mind.
There's no doubt that outsourcing is a touchy subject, and the McClatchy Co. is feeling defensive about their new revenue strategy in California. Outsourcing of jobs is nothing new in this country in the past decade, and information technologies that make it possible. So what happened to the promise of The Information Age?
We were once told "old economy" jobs would be replaced by new ones in the high-tech and white-collar information service sector. Americans are finding out the hard way that new technologies can make the jobs fly out of the country faster.
Since 2001, this country has lost 2.7 million manufacturing jobs overseas in order to get cheaper labor, according to www.OutsourceOutrage.com, a Web site devoted to informing the public about the facts of outsourcing and how it's hurting our economy.
According to a report from the University of California/Berkeley the trend of outsourcing is going to account for about 14 million jobs going overseas in the next four years. Outsourcing of our best-paying jobs, globally and domestically, has contributed to a general decline in worker living standards here.
In the past year, according to an Economic Policy Institute report, 80 percent of working families saw a drop in real wages despite healthy gains in worker productivity. Of the new jobs that were created in the last year, 90 percent of them are in low-wage fields, according to the report.
In the scramble to make a profit in our staggering economy, businesses are choosing to cut corners regardless of the impact on American workers. Forget about the pride of being made in America. It has no weight in the modern workplace. We continue to devalue ourselves.
I dread to see what will be outsourced next. Newspaper editors perhaps? Somewhere along the line we're losing more than just jobs. When newspapers lay off someone here and hire someone in India, they are breaking their trust with the American public in order to pinch pennies.
As an old newspaper man, I find it difficult to see what's happening to such an important part of our society because of lack of imagination in solving money problems. I'm not talking about bringing in robots to speed up production and lower costs as in manufacturing.
I'm talking about a job that needs to be done by a human. The choice is simple. Let go of American journalists, and you give their jobs to Indian journalists. Are they smarter than us? Do they make better page designers and copy editors?
I don't think that's the case. There's no reason, other than greed disguised as a business decision, to send out our written word to be edited by another country that offers cheaper labor.
As It Stands, the profession of print journalism is facing enough challenges without outsourcing its production, traditions, pride, and obligation to the American people.
Dave Stancliff is a columnist for The Eureka Reporter. He is a former newspaper editor and publisher. His e-mail address is richstan1@suddenlink.net