Maria Trombly

Outsourcing journalism to China

You thought that China was good in making only teddy bears and jeans. Think again. Maria Trombly writes in a great column for the SPJ International Journalism Committee about her Shanghai-operation in working for mainly US-based trade publications.
Reuters has already been outsourcing to India, but Maria takes that process a step further, using staff in India to leverage the poorer language skills in China.
From her apartment in Shanghai, she recently moved to a real office, but the real action is online.

... once we had the online editorial workflow system set up, it became easy to plug people into it anywhere in the world. So there's a copy editor in Paris, for example, who uses the database to fact-check our payments stories and to answer questions from editors in Chicago while we're all asleep. And a reporter in India, Jojo Puthuparampil, uses the database to to file information on payments and securities stories. Jojo is great -- he's the most experienced of my writers, with several years covering business and stock markets for Indian papers. And he writes in fluent English, with only the occasional British "colour" or "centre" throw in.

I have been seeing Maria's operation take off from the side-lines, so can vouch her record is a pretty accurate one. What is missing is the blood, sweat and tears behind it. It sounds all very easy in the way Maria describes her China operation, but it is not. You do need an almost pathological optimistic outlook on the world to succeed her. Maria fortunately has.
In the already longer term discussion on the future of the foreign correspondent, Maria Trombly has added her own solution.

O yes. Maria is going to be one of the prominent people in our upcoming China Speakers' Bureau once she finds the time to answer some basic questions we asked her. We are sure that will be done very soon, so drop us a line if you are interested in hear Maria speak.