I. Can’t. Believe. It.

Maureen Dowd, cutting edge super internet researcher extraordinaire, recently discovered James Macpherson and his groundbreaking outsourcing of local news coverage to India. I kid you not. From the frigging NY Times:

I visited the future, and it was wearing a bow tie and calling itself “Thomas Edison.”

The newspaper business is not only crumpling up, James Macpherson informed me here, it is probably holding “a one-way ticket to Bangalore.”

Macpherson — bow-tied and white-haired but boyish-looking at 53 — should know. He pioneered “glocal” news — outsourcing Pasadena coverage to India at Pasadena Now, his daily online “newspaperless,” as he likes to call it. Indians are writing about everything from the Pasadena Christmas tree-lighting ceremony to kitchen remodeling to city debates about eliminating plastic shopping bags.

I can’t believe what I’m reading. Some questions pop to mind:

1) Where was Maureen when this brouhaha went down, um, a year ago. I’d link back to our coverage of the original story, but our wretched archives still aren’t back up. More impressive, though, is Jill’s list of people linking to/talking about the story. Unless I’m mistaken, just about every media outlet in the world covered this story when it broke. Where on God’s green earth was Maureen Dowd?

2) Is James Macpherson getting kooky?

“I have essentially been five years ahead of the world for a long time, and that’s a horrible address at which to live because people look at you, you know, like you’re nuts.”

Mmmhmm. Five years ahead of the world, James? I admit, outsourcing coverage to India was a bold stroke. It didn’t, however, raise the level of Pasadena Now above the middlin’ mediocrity it has inhabited for, well, ever. I spent so long last year trying to link to their stories, and eventually realized it just wasn’t worth the trouble. It’s not a terrible site, but as far as news goes, it does offer much to me.

I checked in with one of his workers in Mysore City in southern India, 40-year-old G. Sreejayanthi, who puts together Pasadena events listings. She said she had a full-time job in India and didn’t think of herself as a journalist. “I try to do my best, which need not necessarily be correct always,” she wrote back. “Regarding Rose Bowl, my first thought was it was related to some food event but then found that is related to Sports field.”

Macpherson admits you can lose something in the translation — the Pasadena City Council Webcast that the Indian reporters now watch once missed two African-American lawmakers walking out in protest — but says the question is, how significant is it?

Um, I would have thought that would be the ONLY important thing to happen at the city council meeting. What did the Indians report on: “Steve Madison did not appear to be present”?

Macpherson feels “vindicated,” but also “conflicted” about the idea of having an American newspaper industry fueled by Indian labor. “I mean, I am an American too,” he said. “I had two ancestors in the Revolutionary War. My mother was in the Daughters of the American Revolution.”

What the…

3) Um, what about accuracy?

I checked in with one of his workers in Mysore City in southern India, 40-year-old G. Sreejayanthi, who puts together Pasadena events listings. She said she had a full-time job in India and didn’t think of herself as a journalist. “I try to do my best, which need not necessarily be correct always,” she wrote back. “Regarding Rose Bowl, my first thought was it was related to some food event but then found that is related to Sports field.”

Need not be correct. Aye yi yi…well, I gotta admit, you’re making me not think of you as a journalist either. Hey, just come be a blogger where mistakes are acceptable.

~

I still can’t believe that Maureen Dowd just noticed this story, that her editors let her go ahead with it, that James Macpherson was equated to Thomas Edison, and that Pasadena Now’s staffers think the Rose Bowl is some kind of oversized cornucopia. Madness.

UPDATE: JMac has started a blog. I think my cerebellum just fused.

UPDATE II: Kevin Roderick:

I still never hear Pasadena Now mentioned in any context but the India thing, nor have I ever seen it.

I’m not surprised.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, December 2nd, 2008 at 5:58 am and is filed under Journalism, Pasadena. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.