Last year, a news Web site in Pasadena, Calif., made headlines when they started outsourcing city hall coverage to reporters in India. Using simple webcams and e-mail, Pasadena Now would put journalists half a world away inside city council chambers to observe and file stories on local government. The site fired its staff, and replaced them with Indians who'd crank out 1,000-word stories for the rock-bottom rate of $7.50.
The media world was abuzz: American news outfit outsources local reporting to the subcontinent. Could we all be next?
We wondered too about the limits of outsourcing local news, particularly alternative journalism. Covering city council meetings via webcam is one thing. Producing entire issues of a local news and arts weekly is quite another. What started as a joke � "I've got an idea. Let's outsource an entire issue to India just to see if it can be done" � has culminated in what you see here.
Vanishing revenues have put the newspaper industry in a death spiral and many papers long ago outsourced other functions (like IT support centers and telemarketing) to India. We devised this issue as an experiment on what outsourced news might look like.
