Bangalore It Is !!!

Reuters has been moving some jobs to India as part of its outsourcing drive. This seems to have irked some employess and they featured an ad in this week’s NYTimes.

On page A18 of the New York Times this morning there’s an interesting ad paid for by the Newspaper Guild-CWA.

It runs from top to botton along half the width of a page.

At the top is a photo of an older man in a suit (Warren Buffet) and underneath is the following caption:
“Buffet (pictured above), known for such hits as “Margaritaville” and “Cheeseburger in Paradise,” promotes his upcoming tour.”

And then the ad goes on:

“If Reuters continues to send photo editing and reporting work overseas, accuracy will suffer. Warren Buffet or Jimmy Buffet? Not easily confused,unless you’re a worker in Singapore, India or someo other far away place trying to report on news or caption photos from 6,000 miles away. …”

It goes on for several paragraphs then urges readers to go to www.thereutersreport.com and from there you’re redirected to the Newspaper Guild of New York’s site.

The website has these three ads

canyoucover_1.jpg

canyoucover_2.jpg

canyoucover_3.jpg

dontbetonbangalore.gif

According to me this ad borders on xenophobia and racism.

To get a more accurate picture about the kind of ridiculous mistakes that appear in stories edited by American journalists in America every day check Regret the Error

Check out the “major errors” category:

Published

5 comments

  1. Hi Arzan
    This is a very interesting story.
    I wonder why they chose Bangalore. I would have thought there would be more people with news experience in Mumbai.

  2. Michael, that was my first thought too. I guess the work that is going to be done is a lot of backend fact checking and number crunching, especially for wall street journal and hence it does not matter where. Also people associate outsourcing with Bangalore thanks in no part to Tom Freidman’s “Flat World” 🙂

  3. a good find Arzan.

    I think quality work doesn’t depend on where you are, but who’s doing the work. If they move to India knowing that they can get at least the same quality for a lower price, it’s just common sense…….
    but there’ll always be people opposing it, and who will come up with arguements based on everything but fact…..

  4. Sunil

    You are correct. In most cases, when outsourcing is discusssed in American media, there is a lot of exaggeration of the actual numbers.

    Ten times more manufacturing jobs have been lost to the other devil “China” (US of course being the first !! 🙂 ) but no one seems to say a lot of that.

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