Showing posts with label outsourcing. Show all posts
Showing posts with label outsourcing. Show all posts

Wednesday, June 25, 2008

The Daily Blab: Outsourced to The Daily Raj


A long time ago, I was stupid enough to enter my local university. There, I worked hard for a long time, both in the classroom and on the campus daily, and emerged some years later with something called a "journalism degree."

After graduation, I -- along with a great many similarly deluded young people -- went to work for American newspapers. Some of us became reporters. Others, copy editors. Some of us have been both . . . and other things in the media world, as well.

Generally, we all worked hard to know our communities backwards and forwards. And, generally, we all became proficient enough in our areas of expertise that -- before the advent of the World Wide Web -- we, the oracles of The Daily Blab, became daily settlers of bar bets.

And though we already were native speakers (and writers) of English, we still worked to sharpen our writing skills and become even more expert in English grammar and usage.

Even amid a dying newspaper industry, journalists thought that native-speaker thing, at least, would save them from being "outsourced." We thought our college degrees were worth something -- well, worth something economically. We thought we had "bettered ourselves" in some tangible manner.

Saps!

Dupes!

Suckers!

WE THOUGHT LIKE LIT . . . which is a bawdy and scatological cultural reference that Apu in New Delhi will let slip past him -- and into The Daily Blab -- every time. From The Associated Press:

An Indian company will take over copy editing duties for some stories published in The Orange County Register and will handle page layout for a community newspaper at the company that owns the Pulitzer Prize-winning daily, the newspaper confirmed Tuesday.

Orange County Register Communications Inc. will begin a one-month trial with Mindworks Global Media at the end of June, said John Fabris, a deputy editor at the Register.

Mindworks' Web site says the company is based outside New Delhi and provides "high-quality editorial and design services to global media firms ... using top-end journalistic and design talent in India."

Editors at Mindworks will work five shifts a week for one month, performing layout for the community paper and editing some stories in the flagship Register, Fabris said. Staffing at the company will not be affected, he said.

Fabris did not specify which community newspaper would be laid out by Indian designers.

"This is a small-scale test, which will not touch our local reporting or decision-making. Our own editors will oversee this work," Fabris said in an e-mail to The Associated Press. "In a time of rapid change at newspapers, we are exploring many ways to work efficiently while maintaining quality and improving local coverage."
WE'RE ALL DISPOSABLE. Yes, we are.

And the Bolshevik Revolution happened for a reason. I'm just sayin'.