

The news business is probably holding “a one-way ticket to Bangalore.” - ippisl
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/30/opinion/30dowd.html?_r=1&partner=permalink&exprod=permalink

======
iamelgringo
While I certainly understand the interest in outsourcing journalism, I'd much
rather see newspapers do things like <http://www.mattwaite.com> has been doing
over at the St. Petersburg times. Matt was the journalist/programmer that
created <http://www.politifact.com> (the first website to win a Pulitzer). I
think he's a huge unsung hero in the journalism world. I met him at DjangoCon
2008, and I've been mentally referring back to that conversation ever since.

Here's other links to his work: <http://mugshots.tampabay.com/>
<http://hometeam.tampabay.com/> <http://watch.tampabay.com/homes/>

Journalists have a lot of training at tracking down public data sources, be it
local home sales, sports scores or crime statistics. Those data sources things
are just crying out for web applications. Matt's taken that idea and run with
it. I hope other newspapers follow his lead, rather than simply outsourcing
all their local coverage to Mumbai.

------
ojbyrne
Understatement of the decade: "it’s going to get to the point where saving the
industry may require some people losing their jobs"

~~~
gvb
I gave a lightning talk at the Great Lakes Software Excellence Conference
<http://www.glsec.org/> with the premise that in-house, outsourcing, and off-
shoring development can be modeled in systems engineering terms of bandwidth
and latency. I posted the talk on my blog
<http://jerryjousting.blogspot.com/>.

My conclusion from observing over the years is that companies with failed
business models go offshore to die. Not all businesses that go off-shore die,
but the ones that have business models that require close interaction with
their suppliers and customers, that require quick reaction, or that require
unique (domain) knowledge won't be successful with a move off-shore. The
businesses that survive, even thrive, off-shore are ones that are or can
become commodity suppliers (e.g. low bandwidth is sufficient for control and
they can tolerate high latency on their product).

Sometimes the business model can be changed to adapt but a business is too
ossified to adapt. Sometimes the whole business is no longer viable and the
end is inevitable. Either way, historically, trying to maintain a failed
business model simply by cutting labor costs fails.

Local news is not something you can off-shore successfully. It requires high
bandwidth, local knowledge, and low latency. From the article: "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?" Ummm... like, _everything?_

~~~
ShabbyDoo
>My conclusion from observing over the years is that companies with failed
business models go offshore to die.

I'm consulting for a Fortune 500 that has used a particular 3rd party system
for a significant business function for the past decade. Since the vendor
seems incapable of debugging its own system, I ended up reverse engineering
parts of it to identify the bug. Then, a call was scheduled between me, the
Fortune 500's application support folks, and the vendor's application support
folks. The vendor's customer service supervisor and I were the only two people
on the call who were not located in India.

An analysis of the application's architecture is a data point in support of
your claim. The oldest pieces of the application seem to have some thought
behind them although the implementation is significantly outdated. However,
the vendor's off-shored web-ification of the application is a cut & paste
spaghetti disaster (as easily observed in nearly 4K JSPs, each with one-off
authentication code). This company was recently sold to another software
vendor that seems to collect has-been cash cows, so it's clearly a couple
steps from the graveyard.

------
gaius
So wrong I barely know where to start.

Why are drugs expensive when manufacturing them is cheap? Because discovering
them is expensive. Why are games and movies expensive when burning a DVD is
cheap? Because producing them is expensive. Why is news expensive when you can
just publish it on the web? Because gathering interesting news is expensive
and that's not changing anytime soon. People don't read a broadsheet to find
out what's playing at their local cinema. They read stuff written by people
who've been working on the story for 6 months, or 30 years building their list
of contacts and their knowledge of a field.

The Times and the Encyclopedia Britannica, or some guy's blog and Wikipedia,
world's gotta choose.

~~~
tumult
Some guy's blog and Wikipedia have been more accurate and interesting than
news outlets for years now.

Most news outlets are just mills for regurgitating press releases wired over
AP and Reuters. There's little actual reporting going on. It's much cheaper to
run a paper this way -- fewer people working on the content itself allows you
to print lots of paper with ads on it. Much of it is automated.

It's not like this is either some conspiracy or something unique to news. It's
cheaper to run a restaurant by getting more of your stuff from Sysco. It's
cheaper to build car lineups by basing more of them off of the same model and
rebranding them. It's cheaper to print papers with ad space on them by
automating the news portions as much as possible.

There's little reporting or fact checking going on. Only a few of the better
papers aren't just regurgitation machines at this point, and even then, you're
less likely to find hard-line reporting than years ago.

~~~
gamble
This is why I feel so little sympathy for the newspaper industry's problems.

If every paper started charging for access to their website tomorrow, the only
ones worth bothering with would be AP/Reuters, NYT, WaPo, the Economist, and
WSJ. A handful of papers produce 90% of the worthwhile, original content. The
_hundreds_ of other papers published today add little to nothing of their own.

~~~
vetinari
Well, I'm starting to lose respect for The Economist. There were few articles
from area that I'm involved in and the articles were just one sides'
arguments, without contacting the other side. The article author just met with
someone in nice restaurant, listened to them and then run with the info. There
was no effort for digging deeper, it is cheaper after all and fills pages too.

------
groaner
Perhaps we can expect more of this in the future:

    
    
        "We didn't know the Onion was not a real news site."
    

<http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/8237558.stm>

~~~
gamble
My first reaction on reading this article was wondering whether _it_ came from
The Onion...

------
nzmsv
This has been tried with tech support. A lot of companies that did this have
since moved call centres back to North America. Why? Because the customers
revolted.

So the only thing this will achieve is to speed the death of the newspaper.
Instead of differentiating themselves from all the spamblogs out there they
seek to join them. They seem to not understand that the only purpose of those
is to game Google rankings, which don't exist on paper.

------
qeorge
The likelihood of news jobs going overseas aside, I would enjoy a more global
flavor to news in the United States. I often find the BBC's take on current
events illuminating, and I'd be interested in quality coverage from other
parts of the globe.

