Link: US journalists afraid their jobs will be outsourced.
According to Nick Farrell at The Inquirer:
The (International Herald Tribune) article cites a WAN global survey of about 350 newspaper bosses in
Europe, Asia and the United States. They expected outsourcing to
increase, although few were willing to farm out all of their editorial
functions.
Part of the reason is that advertising revenues for print media is
dropping and people are failing to buy hard copies of their news.
The article cites the outsourcing of the business pages of the UK’s Daily Express to India as an example of what could happen in the US.
The article mentions that much of the work being taken by India is the ‘crap hack’ work.
In which case, won’t we see low level ‘crap PR work’ being outsourced to India too?
One reply on “US journalists afraid their jobs will be outsourced”
This simply won’t work.
I know.
As a freelance editor, I’ve had to deal with work being outsourced to the Far East. As I said, it doesn’t work. One Hong Kong company I work for (who have taken on editing and typesetting for a major UK publisher who used to employ me directly) have admitted that they can’t replace skilled native English speakers. What’s more, I know from anecdotal report that Indian firms are having exactly the same problem.
Perhaps poor-quality editing, writing, PR and typesetting can be sourced from anywhere, but believe me, it’s a false economy.
If you want top-quality material you have to pay top-quality people top-quality rates. Otherwise, you’ll go out of business. Full stop.
Happy trails!