Outsourcing News Gathering
Nightly Business Report
Thursday, May 17, 2007
SUSIE GHARIB: In tonight’s commentary, outsourcing journalism. Here's Myron Kandel, president of the New Hampshire Initiative for Corporate Responsibility and Investor Protection.
MYRON KANDEL, PRESIDENT, NEW HAMPSHIRE INITIATIVE FOR CORPORATE RESPONSIBILITY: I’ve been in journalism for a long time and I’ve seen good times and bad. Right now, newspapers have hit a bad patch, although I still think good journalism will survive and prosper. But I really got upset by news that the editor and publisher of a local website has hired two reporters to cover Pasadena’s city council. Guess where they will be working? Not in Pasadena, California, but in India.
Now, you may ask, how can you cover events happening nearly 9,000 miles away? Well, it seems the Pasadena city council broadcasts its meetings on the web, which can be accessed from anywhere. So those reporters -- one getting paid $12,000 a year and the other, $7,500, presumably can do the work of American reporters who would get paid a lot more, although, according to some job-hunting journalism graduates I’ve met, not all that much more.
The owner of the nicely-designed website called Pasadena Now claims that the routine material that comes out of city council meetings can be covered from overseas and he will supervise their work, which, by the way, has not yet appeared on the website. But anyone who’s covered local meetings will tell you that what happens in official sessions is usually only the tip of the iceberg and you get the real news by personal contacts and digging through documents. So those users of the Pasadena website may not be getting the real story. They will be the worse for it, and so will the profession of journalism. I just hope it doesn’t catch on. I’m Myron Kandel.