Outsourcing News Production

Newsday.com:

Union employees at Reuters are stepping up their campaign against the wire service's outsourcing of U.S. jobs, most recently transferring the editing and caption writing of photos to its Singapore office and some Internet work to Toronto.

Members of the Newspaper Guild-Communications Workers of America have distributed leaflets outside Reuters' office in Times Square. Critical ads also have been placed in Investor's Business Daily and the Columbia Journalism Review, and more are planned for the Web.

The union complains that the quality and accuracy of the news suffers. Reuters says there is no unacceptable departure from company standards and it's cheaper to outsource certain functions. In any event, there's nothing to prevent the company from sending work to outsiders and it's a prudent business move. Reuters is believed to be the first in the media world to outsource news production and it's suspected that others will soon follow.

[Update] A reader has mentioned that the actual quality of the news produced may suffer due to language differences between the U.S. and Asian countries. Notably, the outsourced production work is performed by people who have only second-language knowledge of English and, therefore, may not comprehend all its subtleties. As a result, final news reports may be nuanced unintentionally or miss a desired slant.

We know that criticism is occasionally and deservedly leveled at Asian call centers because of language differences, but the criticism concerns voice communication. With respect to outsourcing news production, it's print communication which, to my knowledge, has not been a source of concern. Since the Reuters outsourcing plan is the first to be tried for the print media, we'll just have to wait and see if something is lost in translation. My guess would be that the scheme will work fine for Reuters, although its employees may experience some stress.