Pasadena Where?

If anyone needs proof that some major newspapers don't have enough serious stuff to write about, one might consider the New York Times' apparent fascination with a guy named James Macpherson, who has outsourced the local news coverage of his Pasadena news website to India. Today it was Maureen Dowd's turn to discuss this "horrendous" (just a little news-speak, folks) betrayal of American journalism. I had to yawn through six paragraphs before I discovered the name of this online news site, which is called Pasadena Now, and couldn't help wondering why the Times didn't provide a link to it.

Not that there is anything particularly interesting there. It's rather like the local newspapers I grew up with in Oswego County, The Fulton Patriot and the Oswego Valley News, which consisted mainly of photographs, local stories, announcements of pending events, promotion of local people and businesses, and advertisements. You know the kind of newspaper I mean-- if your high school team won a game, your picture would be in the paper a week or two later, and columns of print were devoted to publishing the local schools' honor rolls. Actually, Pasadena Now is more attractive, though not necessarily more substantial, than that. In any case, it's more colorful, and there are more bells and whistles, but I bet if you look deep enough you'll find last week's league bowling scores somewhere.

This isn't the first time Mr. MacPherson and his outsourcing have made the New York Times. Last year, it got coverage in the Times blog "Freakonomics." Could it be because journalists at the nation's flagship newspaper are worried about losing their jobs to part-time workers from Mumbai and Bangalore? No, it has to be the gently bizarre image of someone in India sitting down with various internet references to cobble together news stories for an online newspaper half a world away. According to Dowd, MacPherson pays his writers $7.50 per 1000 words to write local news stories for Pasadena Now. She quotes one of these writers, who lives in Mysore, India: “I try to do my best, which need not necessarily be correct always. Regarding Rose Bowl, my first thought was it was related to some food event but then found that is related to Sports field.”

The Rose Bowl as a food event-- I have to admit that this tickled my fancy enough to make me actually go and look at Pasadena Now and try to figure which stories were being written in India. Of course, they don't just hand you this information on a plate, but the byline "From STAFF REPORTS" appears frequently on brief local news stories, such as "Police Patrols Protect Shoppers." What these articles have in common is that they're short, and most of them are just bare facts. The writing and eccentric punctuation are about standard for newspaper writing these days. If MacPherson and newspapers like the Times hadn't made such a big deal about it, people in Pasadena probably wouldn't have noticed any difference. Well, maybe the seven employees who got fired would have noticed, but I bet no one else would have.