Reporting local Pasadena, CA, news from ... Mumbai, India

On the news beat in Mumbai, California

· US website recruits reporters living in India
· Journalists cover council meetings via internet

Dan Glaister in Los Angeles
Saturday May 12, 2007
The Guardian

It is a story destined to chill the soul of even the most diligent and productive of journalists. A news website in Pasadena, California, has recruited a pair of reporters who will be expected to write one or two 500 word stories each day detailing the business of the local council, as well as two in-depth pieces each week.

They do not need to come into the office. In fact, it is unlikely they will visit the office, meet their editor or even see Pasadena. The two new recruits to PasadenaNow.com are based 7,979 miles away in India, one in Bangalore, one in Mumbai.

"This is a revolutionary idea," said James Macpherson, the website's editor. "A few of the people who applied for these posts got the idea and see themselves as revolutionaries at the frontier."
Unsurprisingly, Macpherson recruited his cub reporters through the internet. "We seek a newspaper journalist based in India to report on the city government and political scene of Pasadena, California, USA," said the posting placed on an equivalent of Craigslist earlier this week.

"We do not believe that geographic distance between India and California will present unsurmountable problems, and that working together with you will result in you developing a keen working knowledge of this city's affairs. This will result in accurate and authoritative reports."

The two reporters, who will watch council proceedings live on the internet, come cheap by Californian standards: the Mumbai post will attract $12,000 (£6,000), the one in Bangalore, $7,200.

For Macpherson recruiting in India was an obvious solution to his staffing problems. "I've had unfortunate experiences with low-cost articles," he said. Interns and students, "are extremely demanding and produce inferior work."

So he put to use his experience in the clothing industry, when he would outsource manufacturing to India and Vietnam. "This is just like a manufacturing process," he said.

Macpherson is not the first to outsource writing. Reuters news agency has a staff of 1,000 in Bangalore, including 100 journalists writing financial news stories. The Boston Globe also recently announced some jobs would be outsourced to India. But this is the first time that a reporting brief has been handed to journalists on the other side of the world.

The move has provoked stern criticism from those concerned about integrity. "It would be very difficult to understand the issues Pasadena faces without ... walking the streets of Pasadena," wrote a blogger on the Foothill Cities website, which covers Pasadena and the surrounding area.

University of Southern California journalism professor and Pasadena resident Bryce Nelson was sceptical about the move. "This is a truly sad picture of what American journalism could become."

But among the dire predictions of the death of local reporting, a more prosaic motive suggests itself: the editor could not find a local prepared to sit through the tedium of Pasadena's council meetings.

"I have been unable to find anyone to work for me who will sit through them to the very end," he admitted. "No matter how much I offer them. A lot of work in the US is done by aliens because Americans won't do it. This is just the same as that."