Last year, a news Web site in Pasadena, Calif., made headlines when they started outsourcing city hall coverage to reporters in India. Using simple webcams and e-mail, the site, Pasadena Now, would put journalists half a world away inside city council chambers to observe and file stories on local government. The site fired its staff, and replaced them with Indians who’d crank out 1,000-word stories for the rock-bottom rate of $7.50.

The media world was abuzz: American news outfit outsources local reporting to the subcontinent. Could we all be next?

We wondered too about the limits of outsourcing local news, particularly alternative journalism. Covering city council meetings via webcam is one thing. Producing entire issues of a local news and arts weekly is quite another. What started as a joke — "I’ve got an idea. Let’s outsource an entire issue to India just to see if it can be done" — has culminated in what you see here.

Vanishing revenues have put the newspaper industry in a death spiral and many papers long ago outsourced other functions (like IT support centers and telemarketing) to India. We devised this issue as an experiment on what outsourced news might look like.

We posted ads on Craigslist in Bangalore and Mumbai back in March seeking journalists to write this issue of our paper — news, arts, food, sex advice, the auto column, the horoscope, the whole pakora. In just weeks, we had over 100 replies from Indian freelancers willing to do just about anything for us. Some were journalists with impressive credentials — The Guardian, BBC, The Times of India — and others were "content writers" or technical writers hungry for any assignment we could throw them. We hired the best writers we could find (and afford) and provided them with the sketch details and contacts needed to write their stories. We did not outsource the listings sections because the potential for screw-ups seemed high and because they are some of the best-read and most relied-upon sections of the paper each week. And we retained a few other pieces that were generated stateside. (Outsourced material has a "Made in India" stamp on the page.)

We know what you’re thinking — what are we nuts?!? Newspapers executives are already drunk with cost-cutting schemes that have decimated local coverage, and here we are pouring them a tall, frosty glass of Kingfisher.

If our owners want to replace us with Indians, all we can say is good luck! If they find locating, hiring and keeping after these writers half the challenge we did, they might think twice about replacing us. Far from giving us a week off, it took practically the entire editorial staff to assign, edit, manage and assemble this project. Some of that would surely be made easier by having Indian reporters on retainer (rather than building an entire freelance stable from scratch). But other challenges we encountered seem more universal.

How do you coordinate an interview between an Indian journalist and a California musician used to dealing with American writers, with a 12-hour-plus time difference? How can you review restaurants and plays when you can’t taste the food or see the show? How do you get the news tips people drop in casual conversation in the town clerk’s office or the local pub?

Most sections proved possible to farm out — and with sometimes hilarious results. Journalist Dev Das interviewed a pair of mind-readers performing a world-premiere telepathy show in West Hartford this week — then he shared a vindaloo recipe with their publicist. The band Cake thought our idea was absurd and funny, and were good sports to play along. Weirdly, we were even contacted by an American writer who is thinking of moving to India and saw our job posting. And some of the freelancers went AWOL, failing to submit the stories we’d asked for, or, in other cases, filing copy that required a drastic overhaul to make it accurate and coherent.

And this project wasn’t exactly cheap. We can’t tell you exactly how much we paid the writers, but suffice to say, we didn’t get any 1,000-word articles for $7.50. One writer, a career journalist with a BBC pedigree, demanded at least $1 a word (our normal rate is a fraction of that). Needless to say, we politely passed. Again, reporters on retainer would surely cut down costs, but at what price? We found in some cases that the less we paid, the less we got, in terms of quality.


Back in this hemisphere, we faced complications as well. The Avon Theatre Film Center in Stamford was ready to connect us with director Milos Forman for an interview ahead of his appearance at the center, until they learned the piece would be outsourced. "Outsourcing stories to reporters living abroad is only hurting our wonderful local reporters, who desperately need the work right now," a theater employee told us.

The thing is, we agree. We believe in local news that’s produced locally. And while some media honchos might flirt with, or dabble in, outsourced news, we hope this issue will provide insight as well as a strong note of caution.

It wasn’t our intention for our little outsourcing experiment to put us out of a job. But it’s clear that in an age when publications are aggressively cutting costs and reducing staffs, India’s millions of wired English speakers may present an irresistible resource. If so, our Indian colleagues will have earned the last laugh.

Call us old-school, but we think good, old-fashioned shoe-leather journalism is worth the price. Outsourcing could certainly fill pages, probably very cheaply, but what’s lost is the very essence of local newspapers: presence. At city hall, the local music club or out on the street talking up average folks, presence is what sets local newspapers (dinosaurs though they are sometimes) apart, and what outsourced news could never replace. But don’t take our word for it. Have a read and decide for yourself.

[Our sister papers, the New Haven Advocate and the Fairfield Weekly, also used freelancers from India for this week's issues.  See what our readers in New Haven and Fairfield have to say about our outsourcing experiment.]