|
|
Get Four
|  | MARCH 4, 2004
Reuters' Offshore "Experiment" Global Managing Editor David Schlesinger talks about why the news service is hiring reporters in Bangalore to cover U.S. companies Now you can add journalist to the growing list of white-collar jobs -- along with radiologist, animator, and Wall Street analyst -- that can be outsourced overseas. Reuters, the British news agency that employs some 2,400 journalists and photographers around the globe, said last month that it would hire six journalists in Bangalore, India, to cover news on small- and mid-cap U.S. companies. Technically, it isn't outsourcing, which involves handing off work to another company, says David Schlesinger, Reuters' global managing editor, who's based in New York. The Bangalore scribes will be Reuters employees with Reuters training. Even so, under what the company is calling a pilot program, they'll be doing something unusual in a news organization: Covering U.S. companies from a distant shore. Mainly, it will be grunt work -- writing routine financial news stories from corporate press releases. It may seem a bit odd that a profession that's already known for modest pay -- trust me, the multimillion-dollar contracts of TV news personalities such Barbara Walters are the exception -- is the latest to be shipped to a low-wage country. But thanks to union agreements, Reuters journalists in the U.S. make a decent living. An entry-level reporter in New York can earn about $58,000 a year, says Peter Szekely, chairman of the Reuters unit of the Newspaper Guild of New York. "A LOT OF ANXIETY." With Reuters striving to trim $1.6 billion in costs by 2006 vs. what it spent 2000, there's no doubt that it likes the idea of paying Indian-size wages. Archrival Bloomberg has overtaken Reuters in the highly profitable business of selling financial-data terminals used by traders and other financial professionals (see BW Int'l Cover Story, 2/9/04, "Rescuing Reuters"). And as part of its cost-cutting, Reuters is already moving technical jobs to Bangalore and software positions to Bangkok. Talk that Reuters could some day expand its Bangalore news operation has made its reporting ranks nervous about job security, Szekely says. "There's a lot of anxiety as a result of this," he adds. Reuters responds by saying it'll always need plenty of journalists on the ground in the U.S. and elsewhere around the world to gather news that can't be obtained from a press release. Although Reuters isn't a U.S. company, it's now likely to be drawn into the debate on overseas outsourcing, which is shaping up as a Presidential campaign issue. The wire agency's initiative could even end up influencing coverage of the subject, as its employees worry that their jobs could one day be at risk. Recently, Wahlgren, who worked at Reuters before joining BusinessWeek Online, chatted with Global Managing Editor Schlesinger about the plans for Bangalore. Edited excerpts of their conversation follow: Q: So you plan to outsource six journalists overseas? A: First of all, outsourcing is the wrong word. Basically, what we're doing is offshoring. We're simply experimenting with doing reporting from a different location. It's no different from what we've always done. If you think about your time at Reuters, we had [the] New York [bureau] cover California companies, or [the] Chicago [bureau] cover companies throughout the Midwest. All we're doing here is having some journalists in Bangalore cover the basic earnings announcements of U.S. companies. So it's certainly not outsourcing, which is giving work to another company. This will be a Reuters office, [with] Reuters journalists, Reuters training, Reuters standards. It's simply moving the work. Q: What will the reporters be doing exactly? A: Well, this is a pilot program. They will be monitoring the PR wire and the business wire [both transmit corporate and other press releases] for announcements of small- and mid-cap companies that we're currently not even covering on a regular basis. And then they'll be doing the basic earnings pro formas off of that. Q: Is there interest from Reuters clients [which include investment banks, other media organizations, and Web sites] in more coverage of these companies? A: Yes, there seems to be. But more important than that, I want to prove the concept. Q: These journalists aren't going to replacing Reuters journalists in other parts of the world? They're going to be hired on top of the existing editorial staff, right? A: These six, that's right.
BW MALL
SPONSORED LINKS
Buy a link now! | | |
 Copyright 2004, by The McGraw-Hill Companies Inc. All rights reserved.Terms of Use | Privacy Notice |
Printer-Friendly Version
