For sale: your job

Dateline, New Delhi: Mark Thursday, May 10, down as the day the sluggish, lumbering beast that is American journalism collapsed heavily on its front quarters, rolled over on its flank and commenced a death rattle that sent chills up the spines of rank-and-file reporters across the country.

That’s right. You can now add journalists to the list of species officially endangered by outsourcing. According to an Associated Press report, James McPherson, the editor and publisher of the two-year-old Web site Pasadena Now, is seeking reporters in India to cover Pasadena City Council meetings via streaming video on the Internet.

“I think it could be a significant way to increase the quality of journalism on the local level without the expense that is a major problem for local publications,” McPherson told AP.

Bites could hardly agree more, at least with the last half of McPherson’s statement, being since the prevailing wage in India is somewhere around $2 per day. Maybe the first half isn’t far off the mark, either. Perhaps some bambina from Bangalore will get the scoop on the New York Times’ loathsome Thomas Friedman, who completely missed the boat on how this outsourcing thing is contributing to the destruction of the American middle class.

Mean & lean: The Pasadena Now story came on the heels of a report in Newspapers & Technology that the San Jose Mercury News will begin outsourcing its advertising production to Express KCS, a firm based in Grugaon, India, on July 1.

The Merc was one of a dozen major daily newspapers dumped by Sacramento-based McClatchy Co. after its acquisition of Knight Ridder last year. MediaNews picked up the Merc, and CEO “Lean” Dean Singleton can expect to save 25 percent to 50 percent on his advertising production costs by outsourcing, and already is doing so at 40 other Northern California newspapers owned by MediaNews.

No word of layoffs yet, but according to N&T, a Mercury News exec posted a message on a newspaper guild Web site expressing that the paper was “appreciative of the work that our composing room employees have performed over the years, and would not be making this decision if it were not supported by sound business reasons.”

Translation for present and future advertising designers: In today’s business world, the Merc’s 17 percent or so profit margin just ain’t cutting it, so we’re cutting your job instead.

Beyond the sea: Bites of course is immune to outsourcing, a.k.a. offshoring. There’s simply no one on the planet that will do this job for less. You, on the other hand, appear to be on the receiving end of an increasingly ugly stick if your elected representatives fail to contest the secret free-trade agreement currently being ironed out by senior congressional Democrats and the Bush administration.

As Bites never tires of warning you, these people, Republicans and Democrats, are not your friends. For three decades, both parties have slowly but surely unraveled the New Deal, eviscerating the few scant protections workers were able to eek out after the entire economy crashed during the Great Depression. After all, it was former President Bill Clinton who signed NAFTA and GATT.

As progressive pundit David Sirota noted last week, don’t count on mainstream media to accurately report the machinations behind the latest “free” trade agreement. Like our elected officials, they’re too busy enabling their greedy, insatiable corporate masters with stories that “lead with triumphalist Bush officials and K Street lobbyists cheering from the office suites of Washington.”

Who knows? Maybe they’re right. Maybe outsourcing is the way to go. No doubt there’s more than one bambina in Bangalore—India, by the way, has stiff tariffs that make offshoring labor prohibitively expensive—who could do a better job than our current crop of corporate-media cheerleaders. Perhaps “free” trade has a silver lining after all.