03-05-2004, 08:42 PM
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#30 (permalink)
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Apocalypse Nerd
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Quote:
Reuters' Offshore "Experiment"
Global Managing Editor David Schlesinger talks about why the news service is hiring reporters in Bangalore to cover U.S. companies
Now you can add journalist to the growing list of white-collar jobs -- along with radiologist, animator, and Wall Street analyst -- that can be outsourced overseas. Reuters, the British news agency that employs some 2,400 journalists and photographers around the globe, said last month that it would hire six journalists in Bangalore, India, to cover news on small- and mid-cap U.S. companies.
Technically, it isn't outsourcing, which involves handing off work to another company, says David Schlesinger, Reuters' global managing editor, who's based in New York. The Bangalore scribes will be Reuters employees with Reuters training. Even so, under what the company is calling a pilot program, they'll be doing something unusual in a news organization: Covering U.S. companies from a distant shore. Mainly, it will be grunt work -- writing routine financial news stories from corporate press releases.
It may seem a bit odd that a profession that's already known for modest pay -- trust me, the multimillion-dollar contracts of TV news personalities such Barbara Walters are the exception -- is the latest to be shipped to a low-wage country. But thanks to union agreements, Reuters journalists in the U.S. make a decent living. An entry-level reporter in New York can earn about $58,000 a year, says Peter Szekely, chairman of the Reuters unit of the Newspaper Guild of New York.
"A LOT OF ANXIETY." With Reuters striving to trim $1.6 billion in costs by 2006 vs. what it spent 2000, there's no doubt that it likes the idea of paying Indian-size wages. Archrival Bloomberg has overtaken Reuters in the highly profitable business of selling financial-data terminals used by traders and other financial professionals (see BW Int'l Cover Story, 2/9/04, "Rescuing Reuters"). And as part of its cost-cutting, Reuters is already moving technical jobs to Bangalore and software positions to Bangkok.
Talk that Reuters could some day expand its Bangalore news operation has made its reporting ranks nervous about job security, Szekely says. "There's a lot of anxiety as a result of this," he adds. Reuters responds by saying it'll always need plenty of journalists on the ground in the U.S. and elsewhere around the world to gather news that can't be obtained from a press release.
Although Reuters isn't a U.S. company, it's now likely to be drawn into the debate on overseas outsourcing, which is shaping up as a Presidential campaign issue. The wire agency's initiative could even end up influencing coverage of the subject, as its employees worry that their jobs could one day be at risk.
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more:
http://www.businessweek.com/bwdaily/...9957_db053.htm
Last edited by Astrocloud; 03-05-2004 at 08:45 PM..
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