Thanks to an October 25, 2007 post on the NY Times sports blog The Quad, we know that Lloyd Carr is a big fan NYT opinion columnist Maureen Dowd. It prompted me to write this post which included this spicy meatball:
Well, if Carr isn’t too busy with consulting on the Eastern Michigan coaching search, he read Dowd’s column on Saturday. She was filling in for fellow columnist Frank Rich and scribed a piece on the state of the print news industry, in particular, the trend that some papers are firing staff and outsourcing their news to India. Seriously. Paying by the article, one thousand words for $7.50.
Dowd found James Macpherson, the man who runs Pasadena Now, an online news site covering the town where you want to be each January first. Here’s a snip:
So, he thought, “Where can I get people who can write the word for less?” In a move that sounded so preposterous it became a Stephen Colbert skit, he put an ad on Craigslist for Indian reporters and got a flood of responses.
He fired his seven Pasadena staffers — including five reporters — who were making $600 to $800 a week, and now he and his wife direct six employees all over India on how to write news and features, using telephones, e-mail, press releases, Web harvesting and live video streaming from a cellphone at City Hall.
Wow. Now, while Coach Carr might laugh at the thought of columnists losing their jobs I doubt it. But surely Lloyd would get a chuckle out of this, emphasis mine:
[Dowd] 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.”
