Outsourcing local news reporting to Bombay

My reaction upon reading a story out of California (where else?) in the morning newspaper was that it was a bogus fits-and-giggles yarn concocted by a reporter with too much time on his hands and an urge to test the alertness of copy editors – an inside joke gone awry that had somehow made it past the gatekeepers and into the paper.

“California site outsources local news coverage to India,” read the headline atop the story from Pasadena. The item reported that the publisher of the Web site pasadenanow.com had posted a help-wanted ad on the Indian edition of another Web site, seeking “a newspaper journalist based in India to report on the city government and political scene of Pasadena, California, USA.”

Say what? Hire a reporter in New Delhi to report the news in a foreign city half a world away, a place the reporter may never have heard of? Surely, the man jests.

Not so. This is the real deal, claimed the Web site publisher, who reportedly had hired two Indian reporters for chump change, compared to what he would have had to pay local reporters.

“Whether you’re at a desk in Pasadena or a desk in Mumbai, you’re still just a phone call or e-mail away from the interview,” James Macpherson told The Associated Press. (True. But if you were a reporter operating from a desk in Pasadena, you presumably would know Pasadena and the right questions to ask in that phone or e-mail interview, whereas if you were a lifelong Mumbaian chained to a desk there, well, probably not so much.)

“I think it could be a significant way to increase the quality of journalism on the local level without the expense that is a major problem for local publications,” Macpherson said.

“Nobody in their right mind would trust the reporting of people who not only don’t know the institutions, but aren’t even there to witness the events and nuances,” scoffed Bryce Nelson, a University of Southern California journalism professor and Pasadena resident. “This is a truly sad picture of what American journalism could become.”

Pencil me in as being in Professor Nelson’s nonbeliever camp on this one. How such a hare-brained scheme might significantly “increase the quality of journalism on the local level” is beyond my pay grade to ascertain.

The last time I tried to make a hotel reservation through some outsourced voice in Kuala Lumpur (“Press 1 for English”), things didn’t turn out so hot, quality-wise, on the local level. I can only imagine what the result might be of some reporter operating in a vacuum in East Punjab trying to explain to Pasadena taxpayers the political ramifications of last night’s council free-for-all in the Rose Bowl city.

Oh, yeah. That’ll work.

On the other hand, I certainly have seen my share of news reports of local government meetings that, for all the reader enlightenment they contained, might as well have been filed by a minimum-wage reporter working on deadline out of a phone booth in Bombay. Ditto for some of the stuff based mainly on anonymous sources offered up these days by the national news media.

Long before the outsourcing of jobs became popular with American industry as a way of conducting business on the cheap, radio was ahead of the curve in the broadcasting of major league baseball games.

Old-time baseball fans often turned to their radios to hear “re-created” Red Sox games emanating from a Boston studio while the Red Sox were playing, say, the White Sox in Chicago. The clacking of a teletype could be heard in the background as each pitch was accounted for by an accomplice at the Chicago ballpark outsourcing the calling of the game to the studio announcer in Boston. Like a reporter in India covering an event in Pasadena, Studio Guy was operating blind, a long way from the action.

Nonetheless, he would gamely translate the information for listeners, adding dashes of color and imagination for dramatic effect. Routine singles up the middle became anything but routine at the hands of a skillful studio play-by-play man.

Sometimes, to fill dead air between pitches, nonexistent rain might commence to fall upon the ballpark, or an imaginary fight break out among beered-up fans. An unwary young listener drifting off to sleep in remote Maine could be hornswoggled into believing he was hearing the real thing, background teletype clatter notwithstanding.

Perhaps a reporter writing from India about a Pasadena zoning board meeting might pull off the deal, with equally mesmerizing results. But I wouldn’t bet my last rupee on it.

BDN columnist Kent Ward lives in Limestone. Readers may reach him via e-mail at olddawg@bangordailynews.net.