Some industries have seen themselves on the safe side of globalization and believed their services were impossible to outsource to countries with lower wages. In the past years China has been taking up massively research and development of multinational companies and seems to be doing a good job, as the investments in R&D only tend to grow, so high-end services are certainly not safe for outsourcing.
Now, another industry is bound to give way to the outsourcing tend: journalism. Reuters was the first to shift a part of its editorial work in 2004 to India, assuring its reporters around the world that it was only about data-filtering and fact-checking. That was a long time ago and meanwhile Reuters has been bought by the Canadian giant Thomson, who has no interest in supporting Reuters' classic and money-losing business of maintaining a huge operation of journalists in every corner of the world.
The news industry was shocked again when a local news website in Pasadena, California, said earlier this year it was looking for Indian reporters to cover local politics. Despite the shock, Pasadena Now went along. (Here you find a good overview of this development.)
But it does not stop in India. Former foreign correspondent Maria Trombly is operating since last year an editorial outsourcing company for mainly US-based publications from Shanghai. While she is also covering China stories, she covers specific subjects like securities, payment systems and outsourcing globally. Outsourcing reporting jobs is not limited to low-end rewriting of press releases, she writes on her weblog.
Part of it is the fact that, for specialized stories, geographical boundaries are meaningless. For example, even when I was reporting from the US, I often quoted technology users at brokerage companies in Europe and Asia, even when the vendors themselves were based in the United States. And the experiences of those users are more and more like those of users in US offices. If a bank in Japan, for example, has a problem with a particular online banking platform, banks in the US will probably have the same issues. (Except in cases where local conditions, such as double-character fonts, are at fault.)
The other part is that once you can talk to a bank or a brokerage in Japan or Korea or Australia or Germany, you can talk to a bank anywhere. If you've figured out what service oriented architectures are all about, you can use that knowledge in any story. A background in chemistry or medicine can help you tackle these specialized stories in any geography.
Research for her company is being done in China, while copy-editors in India keep an eye on the level of the English of her non-native English writers.
When I wrote a small piece on Maria Trombly's operation for Poynter's, an institute for educating journalist, some colleagues wrote - privately - how shocked they were.
Outsourcing of this sort only works to take away more jobs from talented U.S. journalists, coypeditors, etc. as well as those who aspire to be journalists. So, with all the outsourcing of writing, we'll simply end up with more stories that are completely irrelevant to the lifestyle of this region. Why don't we try to talk about how newpapers might concentrate their efforts on home-growing reporters who love the areas they live in, and want to write about them, rather than laying them off and outsourcing them?
The argument is basically not different when US companies started to outsource the production of teddy bears to Asia. As making profits, huge profits, seems to be the only target for most media organizations, outsourcing is increasingly unavoidable. Maria Trombly has one great advise for US journalists who are looking for new jobs. They can offer their skills to Chinese English language publications (and for sure they need them): Stay at home, do not come to China, but offer your services to those Chinese publications over the internet. Reverse the outsourcing.
Fons Tuinstra
PS: Forgot about this. Maria Trombly is also part of our upcoming China Speakers Bureau. If you want to hear Maria talk about outsourcing, journalism or even hot stories from the corporate front here in China, do drop me a line.
