Maureen Dowd Discovers Pasadena Now
by Centinel on December 2nd, 2008I. 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.
December 2nd, 2008 at 2:42 am
Perhaps news from Planet Pasadena takes several light years to reach the mother planet?
If you should actually read the article, instead of just picking through it looking for things to be offended about, you'll discover that Ms. Dowd is using MacPherson's Folly as a metaphor for things happening in the newspaper business today. Perhaps even at her own storied publication. And perhaps the reason she references the time factor is because a wacky policy instituted by Mr. McPherson a while back is only now showing signs of spreading to the more mainstream media?
Many American jobs have been outsourced to foreign nations, and the soaring unemployment rate here can in part be blamed on this short-sighted solution to staffing costs. But isn't there something sadly special about outsourcing that most American of institutions, the free press? That is the gist of Ms. Dowd's column.
I guess now that you're back you feel the need to roil the bumpkins a bit by publishing a specious parochial attack on the big bad New York Times and one of its lead columnists. Which is fine. But if you must engage in this sort of thing, can you at least do it with a little more skill? This is about as embarrassing as the time you blamed Charles Schumer for the collapse of Indy Mac.
December 6th, 2008 at 2:43 am
I think that the bottom line here is that newspapers are dying, and citizens need to have a replacement or we will not get the information about what our local governments are doing that we need, despite the best efforts of The Foothill Cities Blog.
Whatever failings PasadenaNow may have, we need to have a means of delivering news that is undergirded by an economic model that works. If we don't, then whatever news source we have will limp along as a charity case or - worse - as a government-supported outlet. So, if outsourcing part of the work (not all!) to India makes it work, I'm all for it.
Yes, I realize that having reporters on the scene means better journalism, but if that can no longer be done or can't be done in all cases (and the painful death of newspapers suggests that it may not always be possible), then you need to do what you can with the resources you have, and if that means outsourcing some things, then that's what needs to happen.
I believe that it is no longer a debate between good journalism and better journalism; it is a debate between whether we should have journalism or not have journalism. We have to work with the tools we have, not the ones we wish we had, and we need to get a system working. Once it is working hopefully we can build and improve on that. James (who, as a matter of full disclosure, is a friend of mine) is experimenting with one way to do it and I don't think that his experiment should be judged on the basis of a few halting, initial steps.
If I remember the story correctly, someone standing with Winston Churchill looking at a clunky early-stage battle tank said, "What good is that?" to which Churchill replied, "What good is a baby?"
I think a little patience is in order.
December 6th, 2008 at 5:01 am
OK. Outsourcing to India is pretty shabby. But, here's a big Q: whose coverage of local news is better Pasadena Now using Indians or Ass-A-Dena Star-News with locally based reporters who can't find Colorado and Lake or Pasadena Weakly with no reporters, just stand-up wannabees and an editor who forgot what journalism looks like.
Macpherson at least puts sentences together. All Larry Wilson can say is it's "nutty." So who's the better journalist in all that?
Wilson misses that NYT's MD is dissing him, too. The local "real" newspaper with local "real" writers and editors is so damn insightful all it can do is call Macpherson nutty. Then Dowd says, PSN owner Dean Singleton is considering outsourcing Larry Wilson.
Mike
December 16th, 2008 at 3:10 am
Dowd is an idiot.