Dateline Delhi
Ehrenreich, Barbara
Dateline Delhi Flip Side Barbara Ehrenreich The world may be flat, as New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman has written, but I always liked to think I was standing on a hill. Now comes the news...
...Her website is www...
...When the IT jobs started drifting away, we were at first assured that only the more "routine" ones were outsourceable...
...The website's editor points out that he can get two Indian reporters for a mere total of $20,800 a year-and no, they won't be commuting from New Delhi...
...Still, writing was believed to be safe-the last stronghold of Western creativity...
...Excuse me, but isn't this more or less what former New York Times reporter Jayson Blair was fired for-pretending to report from sites around the country while he was actually holed up in his Brooklyn apartment...
...Her latest book is "Dancing in the Streets: A History of Collective Joy...
...I should have seen it coming...
...Explaining the outsourcing of almost every newspaper function, including copyediting, the billionaire CEO of a consortium of Irish newspapers wrote: ''With the exception of the magic of writing and editing news . . . almost every other function, except printing, is location-indifferent...
...And if they ever feel a need to see the potholes of Pasadena, there's always Google Earth...
...So no one really complained when the back office and call center jobs migrated to India in the '90s: Who needed them...
...One of the Indian reporters just hired by pasadenanow.com has a degree from the Graduate School of Journalism at UC-Berkeley, which is one of the three or four best J-schools in the country...
...We would still be the brains of global business...
...Let the low-end, repetitive jobs scatter to the ends of the Earth, we were told-the intellectual and creative work would stay right here...
...I just wish the next time some managers get the idea of cost-saving through outsourcing, they'd go for the CEO's job...
...companies began outsourcing the manufacturing of everything from garments to steel, leaving whole cities to die...
...But no one can pretend any longer that we have a global monopoly on intellect and innovation...
...In the Pasadena case, I can't even complain, as U.S.-based Reuters' workers did when their jobs were outsourced, that the quality of journalism will suffer as a result...
...Education was the recommended solution for the unemployed, because in the globalized future, Americans would be the world's brains, while Mexicans and Malaysians would provide the hands...
...As for all the laid-off techies, they were smart enough to develop new skills, right...
...Or (and this was never supposed to happen) the growing outsourcing of R&D, with scores of companies opening labs in India or China-"Chindia," as they are known in the biz lit...
...In the '80s, U.S...
...Is there nothing an actual, on-site, American can do better than anyone else...
...As for me, I'm retraining as a massage therapist, at least until they figure out how to do that from Mumbai...
...Or will pasadenanow.com be honest enough to give its new reporters datelines in Delhi (or wherever they live...
...That's where the big bucks are, and there's no reason to think a Chinese or an Indian person couldn't do a CEO's work, whatever it may be, perfectly adequately, and at less than a tenth of the price...
...Since Pasadena's city council meetings can be observed on the web, the Indian reporters will be able to cover local politics from half the planet away...
...Now comes the news that pasadenanow.com, a local news site, is recruiting reporters in India...
...Look at the "telemedicine" trend, which has radiologists in India and Lebanon reading CT scans for hospitals in Altoona and Chicago...
...But the magic has clearly been fading, starting two years ago when Reuters began outsourcing its Wall Street coverage to Bangalore...
...barbaraehrenreich.com...
...I have taught there myself, and know that the students are scarily smart...
...Too bad these reporters couldn't get real journalism jobs, at normal American wages, but American newspapers are axing good journalists even as I write...
...Barbara Ehrenreich is a columnist for The Progressive...
...No, I don't resent the Indians for moving in on the kind of work I do...
Vol. 71 • July 2007 • No. 7
