Offshoring evangelist and online publisher James Macpherson says American newspaper publishers need to follow his lead and start shipping jobs to India.
He said he got the idea to outsource about a year ago, sitting in his Pasadena home, where he puts out Pasadena Now with his wife, Candice Merrill. Macpherson had worked in the ’90s for designers like Richard Tyler and Alan Flusser, and had outsourced some of his clothing manufacturing to Vietnam.
So, he thought, “Where can I get people who can write the word for less?” In a move that sounded so preposterous it became a Stephen Colbert skit, he put an ad on Craigslist for Indian reporters and got a flood of responses.
He fired his seven Pasadena staffers — including five reporters — who were making $600 to $800 a week, and now he and his wife direct six employees all over India on how to write news and features, using telephones, e-mail, press releases, Web harvesting and live video streaming from a cellphone at City Hall.
“I pay per piece, just the way it was in the garment business,” he says. “A thousand words pays US$7.50.” ... (that's about $9.28 Cdn. at current exchange rates).
I don't do much freelancing for newspapers these days, but a senior staff reporter at the Toronto Star makes something adjacent to $78,000 per year -- and I don't think that person would have to write 8,400 articles -- each 1,000 words in length -- in a 12-month period to earn that sum. To do so, one would have to punch out about 34 such stories per working day. I'm guessing a Star reporter would produce about two stories per day totalling 1,000 to 1,200 words. If Macpherson's pay scale applied at the Star, a reporter with that level of productivity (if words per hour were the sole measure of a journalist's productivity) would see their income drop to $9.28 to $11.13 per day.
I believe one has to make about $16 per hour to enjoy a living wage. At Macpherson's rates of pay, you'd have to crank out 1,700 words per hour to achieve that -- and that wouldn't include time for reporting or anything else.
Essentially, it would be impossible to earn a living wage here at Macpherson's pay rate.
I checked in with one of his workers in Mysore City in southern India, 40-year-old G. Sreejayanthi, who puts together Pasadena events listings. She said she had a full-time job in India and didn’t think of herself as a journalist. “I try to do my best, which need not necessarily be correct always,” she wrote back. “Regarding Rose Bowl, my first thought was it was related to some food event but then found that is related to Sports field.”
Macpherson admits you can lose something in the translation — the Pasadena City Council Webcast that the Indian reporters now watch once missed two African-American lawmakers walking out in protest — but says the question is, how significant is it?
In Folsom Prison Blues, Johnny Cash sings, "I hear that train a comin'/It's rollin' round the bend ..."
The economic logic is unasssailable, especially if the audience ultimately doesn't care.
If they're getting news for free and find it to be good enough, what does it matter if there's holes in the coverage or if the reporter doesn't know between a Rose Bowl and a rose bowl?
The market may ultimately say that all the intangibles that journalists value so much are, in the end, worthless.