Maureen Dowd pointed out in the New York Times that much newspaper work may soon be outsourced to places like India. As an example, she shared the success of 53-year old James Macpherson at the Pasadena Now.
The concept has certainly started some discussion. But there are three reasons why I think it’s not a sustainable venture.
Trust
“What,” people will ask, “is the difference between a reporter doing interview from India and a reporter doing interviews from down the street?”
Aside from the basic things, like being able to share in the little quirks and personalities of every place on the planet, the difference is rooted in trust. Newspapers will survive and thrive as they build a community around their brand and their personalities.
Time and again the internet proves to be a place where authenticity is absolutely essential, and readers must feel that they are connected. That kind of rapport is nearly impossible to form if your staff lives in another country and you’re trying to do local news.
As a reader, it’s important to me that the guy writing about parking in Belltown has actually tried to park in Belltown before. It’s like you have to be Jewish to make Jew jokes. And so on down the line.
Support Calls
How often do you call support? When you do, are you happy to find someone on the other end of the line who reads from a script and sometimes has trouble speaking your language?
Most people aren’t thrilled. I use GoDaddy for my domains and to host my web sites, including this one, primarily because they have an incredibly awesome support department filled with intelligent people who live in the United States.
The lesson here is that it’s harder than you think to outsource certain parts of your business, and in the end, it will almost always cost you more because you’ll lose customers.
Commodities
Even if it’s profitable now to outsource your reporting (and Dowd certainly suggests that it is), it’s not a long term solution for two big reasons:
- It offers little to no innovation in the business model, and
- News is a commodity
As we move forward, the business model is going to have to adapt, which means exploring ideas like metered content. All the outsourcing does is lower the dollar cost of production while accelerating the process making the product itself into a boring commodity.
And news is becoming a commodity, which means that in order to stand out in the market and make money (to differentiate yourself), you’ll need to focus on the creative side of your content. Good writing and clever personalities are difficult things to outsource, if you ask me.
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Eat Sleep Publish is a Seattle-based blog that explores the difficulties and opportunities currently facing the publishing industry. 
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Wow…you know things are really bad when even journalism can get outsourced.
Uh, wouldn’t it be cheaper and make a hell of a lot more sense to just let interns do the work for free?
Nisha – I think that it will be a shortlived trend, journalism is on some level a “creative” work, and creativity-based jobs are probably going to be the most secure going forward. Check out Lateral Action for more good thoughts on that topic.
Paul – yeah, it’s a lot cheaper. It’s also unsustainable, but you know that
There was a lot of good discussion about this last year, when Pasadena Now started all this. Info Week’s Rob Preston talks and links here.
What’s interesting is the NY Times report about how Indian outsourcing is suffering because so many of the firms rely on Wall Street for work. My suspicion is that other industries–publishing included–will start to recruit more foreign workers, starting during the recession.