7 ms·

The news business is probably holding “a one-way ticket to Bangalore.”

31 points by ippisl 17y ago

deleted 17y ago
[deleted]
- gvb 17y ago
  Edit: the original full text post was deleted (thanks!). To see the story, do a google search: http://www.google.com/search?q=op-ed+columnist+a+penny+for+my+thoughts http://www.google.com/search?q=op-ed+columnist+a+penny+for+m... (for info on why this works, see http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=961361 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=961361)
  - iamelgringo 17y ago
    Please don't use uppercase for emphasis. If you want to emphasize a word or phrase, put asterisks around it and it will get italicized. From the HN guidelines: http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
    - gvb 17y ago
      I realize that, but shouted because it is imperative to obey copyright laws. Copyright violation is especially ironic on a story about news since news people (rightly) make a big deal about obeying copyright laws. The original post was deleted very promptly, resolving the issue. Thanks!
ojbyrne 17y ago
Understatement of the decade: "it’s going to get to the point where saving the industry may require some people losing their jobs"
- gvb 17y ago
  I gave a lightning talk at the Great Lakes Software Excellence Conference http://www.glsec.org/ http://www.glsec.org/ with the premise that in-house, outsourcing, and off-shoring development can be modeled in systems engineering terms of bandwidth and latency. I posted the talk on my blog http://jerryjousting.blogspot.com/ http://jerryjousting.blogspot.com/. My conclusion from observing over the years is that companies with failed business models go offshore to die. Not all businesses that go off-shore die, but the ones that have business models that require close interaction with their suppliers and customers, that require quick reaction, or that require unique (domain) knowledge won't be successful with a move off-shore. The businesses that survive, even thrive, off-shore are ones that are or can become commodity suppliers (e.g. low bandwidth is sufficient for control and they can tolerate high latency on their product). Sometimes the business model can be changed to adapt but a business is too ossified to adapt. Sometimes the whole business is no longer viable and the end is inevitable. Either way, historically, trying to maintain a failed business model simply by cutting labor costs fails. Local news is not something you can off-shore successfully. It requires high bandwidth, local knowledge, and low latency. From the article: "Macpherson admits you can lose something in the translation — the Pasadena City Council Webcast that the Indian reporters now watch once missed two African-American lawmakers walking out in protest — but says the question is, how significant is it?" Ummm... like, everything?
  - ShabbyDoo 17y ago
    >My conclusion from observing over the years is that companies with failed business models go offshore to die. I'm consulting for a Fortune 500 that has used a particular 3rd party system for a significant business function for the past decade. Since the vendor seems incapable of debugging its own system, I ended up reverse engineering parts of it to identify the bug. Then, a call was scheduled between me, the Fortune 500's application support folks, and the vendor's application support folks. The vendor's customer service supervisor and I were the only two people on the call who were not located in India. An analysis of the application's architecture is a data point in support of your claim. The oldest pieces of the application seem to have some thought behind them although the implementation is significantly outdated. However, the vendor's off-shored web-ification of the application is a cut & paste spaghetti disaster (as easily observed in nearly 4K JSPs, each with one-off authentication code). This company was recently sold to another software vendor that seems to collect has-been cash cows, so it's clearly a couple steps from the graveyard.
gaius 17y ago
So wrong I barely know where to start. Why are drugs expensive when manufacturing them is cheap? Because discovering them is expensive. Why are games and movies expensive when burning a DVD is cheap? Because producing them is expensive. Why is news expensive when you can just publish it on the web? Because gathering interesting news is expensive and that's not changing anytime soon. People don't read a broadsheet to find out what's playing at their local cinema. They read stuff written by people who've been working on the story for 6 months, or 30 years building their list of contacts and their knowledge of a field. The Times and the Encyclopedia Britannica, or some guy's blog and Wikipedia, world's gotta choose.
- tumult 17y ago
  Some guy's blog and Wikipedia have been more accurate and interesting than news outlets for years now. Most news outlets are just mills for regurgitating press releases wired over AP and Reuters. There's little actual reporting going on. It's much cheaper to run a paper this way -- fewer people working on the content itself allows you to print lots of paper with ads on it. Much of it is automated. It's not like this is either some conspiracy or something unique to news. It's cheaper to run a restaurant by getting more of your stuff from Sysco. It's cheaper to build car lineups by basing more of them off of the same model and rebranding them. It's cheaper to print papers with ad space on them by automating the news portions as much as possible. There's little reporting or fact checking going on. Only a few of the better papers aren't just regurgitation machines at this point, and even then, you're less likely to find hard-line reporting than years ago.
  - deleted 17y ago
    [deleted]
  - gamble 17y ago
    This is why I feel so little sympathy for the newspaper industry's problems. If every paper started charging for access to their website tomorrow, the only ones worth bothering with would be AP/Reuters, NYT, WaPo, the Economist, and WSJ. A handful of papers produce 90% of the worthwhile, original content. The hundreds of other papers published today add little to nothing of their own.
iamelgringo 17y ago
While I certainly understand the interest in outsourcing journalism, I'd much rather see newspapers do things like http://www.mattwaite.com http://www.mattwaite.com has been doing over at the St. Petersburg times. Matt was the journalist/programmer that created http://www.politifact.com http://www.politifact.com (the first website to win a Pulitzer). I think he's a huge unsung hero in the journalism world. I met him at DjangoCon 2008, and I've been mentally referring back to that conversation ever since. Here's other links to his work: http://mugshots.tampabay.com/ http://mugshots.tampabay.com/ http://hometeam.tampabay.com/ http://hometeam.tampabay.com/ http://watch.tampabay.com/homes/ http://watch.tampabay.com/homes/ Journalists have a lot of training at tracking down public data sources, be it local home sales, sports scores or crime statistics. Those data sources things are just crying out for web applications. Matt's taken that idea and run with it. I hope other newspapers follow his lead, rather than simply outsourcing all their local coverage to Mumbai.
doulaimi 17y ago
http://www.tradekay.com http://www.tradekay.com We are wholesaler of Nike Jordan and Other Shoes. We are a professional exporting company . We supply many kinds of Shoes, such as Nike Shoes, Jordan 1-23, Air Jordan, AF1, DUNK, Air max series etc. Most of them are in stock and can be supplied surely on time. All these shoes are packed with original-boxes and cards. AND We do wholesale and retail! All are extremely CHEAP, please visit: http://www.tradekay.com/productlist.asp?id=s1 http://www.tradekay.com/productlist.asp?id=s1 (UGG) http://www.tradekay.com/productlist.asp?id=n506 http://www.tradekay.com/productlist.asp?id=n506 (JACKET) http://www.tradekay.com/productlist.asp?id=s3 http://www.tradekay.com/productlist.asp?id=s3 (NBA Jersey) http://www.tradekay.com/productlist.asp?id=s12 http://www.tradekay.com/productlist.asp?id=s12 (JORDAN SHOES) http://www.tradekay.com/productlist.asp?id=s70 http://www.tradekay.com/productlist.asp?id=s70 (TSHIRTS) http://www.tradekay.com/productlist.asp?id=s75 http://www.tradekay.com/productlist.asp?id=s75 (JEANS) http://www.tradekay.com/productlist.asp?id=s69 http://www.tradekay.com/productlist.asp?id=s69 (HANDBAGS) http://www.tradekay.com/productlist.asp?id=s57 http://www.tradekay.com/productlist.asp?id=s57 (sunglass)
doulaimi 17y ago
http://www.tradekay.com http://www.tradekay.com We are wholesaler of Nike Jordan and Other Shoes. We are a professional exporting company . We supply many kinds of Shoes, such as Nike Shoes, Jordan 1-23, Air Jordan, AF1, DUNK, Air max series etc. Most of them are in stock and can be supplied surely on time. All these shoes are packed with original-boxes and cards. AND We do wholesale and retail! All are extremely CHEAP, please visit: http://www.tradekay.com/productlist.asp?id=s1 http://www.tradekay.com/productlist.asp?id=s1 (UGG) http://www.tradekay.com/productlist.asp?id=n506 http://www.tradekay.com/productlist.asp?id=n506 (JACKET) http://www.tradekay.com/productlist.asp?id=s3 http://www.tradekay.com/productlist.asp?id=s3 (NBA Jersey) http://www.tradekay.com/productlist.asp?id=s12 http://www.tradekay.com/productlist.asp?id=s12 (JORDAN SHOES) http://www.tradekay.com/productlist.asp?id=s70 http://www.tradekay.com/productlist.asp?id=s70 (TSHIRTS) http://www.tradekay.com/productlist.asp?id=s75 http://www.tradekay.com/productlist.asp?id=s75 (JEANS) http://www.tradekay.com/productlist.asp?id=s69 http://www.tradekay.com/productlist.asp?id=s69 (HANDBAGS) http://www.tradekay.com/productlist.asp?id=s57 http://www.tradekay.com/productlist.asp?id=s57 (sunglass)
doulaimi 17y ago
http://www.tradekay.com http://www.tradekay.com We are wholesaler of Nike Jordan and Other Shoes. We are a professional exporting company . We supply many kinds of Shoes, such as Nike Shoes, Jordan 1-23, Air Jordan, AF1, DUNK, Air max series etc. Most of them are in stock and can be supplied surely on time. All these shoes are packed with original-boxes and cards. AND We do wholesale and retail! All are extremely CHEAP, please visit: http://www.tradekay.com/productlist.asp?id=s1 http://www.tradekay.com/productlist.asp?id=s1 (UGG) http://www.tradekay.com/productlist.asp?id=n506 http://www.tradekay.com/productlist.asp?id=n506 (JACKET) http://www.tradekay.com/productlist.asp?id=s3 http://www.tradekay.com/productlist.asp?id=s3 (NBA Jersey) http://www.tradekay.com/productlist.asp?id=s12 http://www.tradekay.com/productlist.asp?id=s12 (JORDAN SHOES) http://www.tradekay.com/productlist.asp?id=s70 http://www.tradekay.com/productlist.asp?id=s70 (TSHIRTS) http://www.tradekay.com/productlist.asp?id=s75 http://www.tradekay.com/productlist.asp?id=s75 (JEANS) http://www.tradekay.com/productlist.asp?id=s69 http://www.tradekay.com/productlist.asp?id=s69 (HANDBAGS) http://www.tradekay.com/productlist.asp?id=s57 http://www.tradekay.com/productlist.asp?id=s57 (sunglass)
groaner 17y ago
Perhaps we can expect more of this in the future: "We didn't know the Onion was not a real news site." http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/8237558.stm http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/8237558.stm
- gamble 17y ago
  My first reaction on reading this article was wondering whether it came from The Onion...
qeorge 17y ago
The likelihood of news jobs going overseas aside, I would enjoy a more global flavor to news in the United States. I often find the BBC's take on current events illuminating, and I'd be interested in quality coverage from other parts of the globe.
nzmsv 17y ago
This has been tried with tech support. A lot of companies that did this have since moved call centres back to North America. Why? Because the customers revolted. So the only thing this will achieve is to speed the death of the newspaper. Instead of differentiating themselves from all the spamblogs out there they seek to join them. They seem to not understand that the only purpose of those is to game Google rankings, which don't exist on paper.

31 points by ippisl 17y ago

deleted 17y ago

[deleted]

gvb 17y ago
Edit: the original full text post was deleted (thanks!). To see the story, do a google search: http://www.google.com/search?q=op-ed+columnist+a+penny+for+my+thoughts http://www.google.com/search?q=op-ed+columnist+a+penny+for+m... (for info on why this works, see http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=961361 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=961361)
- iamelgringo 17y ago
  Please don't use uppercase for emphasis. If you want to emphasize a word or phrase, put asterisks around it and it will get italicized. From the HN guidelines: http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
  - gvb 17y ago
    I realize that, but shouted because it is imperative to obey copyright laws. Copyright violation is especially ironic on a story about news since news people (rightly) make a big deal about obeying copyright laws. The original post was deleted very promptly, resolving the issue. Thanks!

ojbyrne 17y ago

Understatement of the decade: "it’s going to get to the point where saving the industry may require some people losing their jobs"

gvb 17y ago
I gave a lightning talk at the Great Lakes Software Excellence Conference http://www.glsec.org/ http://www.glsec.org/ with the premise that in-house, outsourcing, and off-shoring development can be modeled in systems engineering terms of bandwidth and latency. I posted the talk on my blog http://jerryjousting.blogspot.com/ http://jerryjousting.blogspot.com/. My conclusion from observing over the years is that companies with failed business models go offshore to die. Not all businesses that go off-shore die, but the ones that have business models that require close interaction with their suppliers and customers, that require quick reaction, or that require unique (domain) knowledge won't be successful with a move off-shore. The businesses that survive, even thrive, off-shore are ones that are or can become commodity suppliers (e.g. low bandwidth is sufficient for control and they can tolerate high latency on their product). Sometimes the business model can be changed to adapt but a business is too ossified to adapt. Sometimes the whole business is no longer viable and the end is inevitable. Either way, historically, trying to maintain a failed business model simply by cutting labor costs fails. Local news is not something you can off-shore successfully. It requires high bandwidth, local knowledge, and low latency. From the article: "Macpherson admits you can lose something in the translation — the Pasadena City Council Webcast that the Indian reporters now watch once missed two African-American lawmakers walking out in protest — but says the question is, how significant is it?" Ummm... like, everything?
- ShabbyDoo 17y ago
  >My conclusion from observing over the years is that companies with failed business models go offshore to die. I'm consulting for a Fortune 500 that has used a particular 3rd party system for a significant business function for the past decade. Since the vendor seems incapable of debugging its own system, I ended up reverse engineering parts of it to identify the bug. Then, a call was scheduled between me, the Fortune 500's application support folks, and the vendor's application support folks. The vendor's customer service supervisor and I were the only two people on the call who were not located in India. An analysis of the application's architecture is a data point in support of your claim. The oldest pieces of the application seem to have some thought behind them although the implementation is significantly outdated. However, the vendor's off-shored web-ification of the application is a cut & paste spaghetti disaster (as easily observed in nearly 4K JSPs, each with one-off authentication code). This company was recently sold to another software vendor that seems to collect has-been cash cows, so it's clearly a couple steps from the graveyard.

gaius 17y ago

So wrong I barely know where to start. Why are drugs expensive when manufacturing them is cheap? Because discovering them is expensive. Why are games and movies expensive when burning a DVD is cheap? Because producing them is expensive. Why is news expensive when you can just publish it on the web? Because gathering interesting news is expensive and that's not changing anytime soon. People don't read a broadsheet to find out what's playing at their local cinema. They read stuff written by people who've been working on the story for 6 months, or 30 years building their list of contacts and their knowledge of a field. The Times and the Encyclopedia Britannica, or some guy's blog and Wikipedia, world's gotta choose.

tumult 17y ago
Some guy's blog and Wikipedia have been more accurate and interesting than news outlets for years now. Most news outlets are just mills for regurgitating press releases wired over AP and Reuters. There's little actual reporting going on. It's much cheaper to run a paper this way -- fewer people working on the content itself allows you to print lots of paper with ads on it. Much of it is automated. It's not like this is either some conspiracy or something unique to news. It's cheaper to run a restaurant by getting more of your stuff from Sysco. It's cheaper to build car lineups by basing more of them off of the same model and rebranding them. It's cheaper to print papers with ad space on them by automating the news portions as much as possible. There's little reporting or fact checking going on. Only a few of the better papers aren't just regurgitation machines at this point, and even then, you're less likely to find hard-line reporting than years ago.
- deleted 17y ago
  [deleted]
- gamble 17y ago
  This is why I feel so little sympathy for the newspaper industry's problems. If every paper started charging for access to their website tomorrow, the only ones worth bothering with would be AP/Reuters, NYT, WaPo, the Economist, and WSJ. A handful of papers produce 90% of the worthwhile, original content. The hundreds of other papers published today add little to nothing of their own.

iamelgringo 17y ago

While I certainly understand the interest in outsourcing journalism, I'd much rather see newspapers do things like http://www.mattwaite.com http://www.mattwaite.com has been doing over at the St. Petersburg times. Matt was the journalist/programmer that created http://www.politifact.com http://www.politifact.com (the first website to win a Pulitzer). I think he's a huge unsung hero in the journalism world. I met him at DjangoCon 2008, and I've been mentally referring back to that conversation ever since. Here's other links to his work: http://mugshots.tampabay.com/ http://mugshots.tampabay.com/ http://hometeam.tampabay.com/ http://hometeam.tampabay.com/ http://watch.tampabay.com/homes/ http://watch.tampabay.com/homes/ Journalists have a lot of training at tracking down public data sources, be it local home sales, sports scores or crime statistics. Those data sources things are just crying out for web applications. Matt's taken that idea and run with it. I hope other newspapers follow his lead, rather than simply outsourcing all their local coverage to Mumbai.

doulaimi 17y ago

http://www.tradekay.com http://www.tradekay.com We are wholesaler of Nike Jordan and Other Shoes. We are a professional exporting company . We supply many kinds of Shoes, such as Nike Shoes, Jordan 1-23, Air Jordan, AF1, DUNK, Air max series etc. Most of them are in stock and can be supplied surely on time. All these shoes are packed with original-boxes and cards. AND We do wholesale and retail! All are extremely CHEAP, please visit: http://www.tradekay.com/productlist.asp?id=s1 http://www.tradekay.com/productlist.asp?id=s1 (UGG) http://www.tradekay.com/productlist.asp?id=n506 http://www.tradekay.com/productlist.asp?id=n506 (JACKET) http://www.tradekay.com/productlist.asp?id=s3 http://www.tradekay.com/productlist.asp?id=s3 (NBA Jersey) http://www.tradekay.com/productlist.asp?id=s12 http://www.tradekay.com/productlist.asp?id=s12 (JORDAN SHOES) http://www.tradekay.com/productlist.asp?id=s70 http://www.tradekay.com/productlist.asp?id=s70 (TSHIRTS) http://www.tradekay.com/productlist.asp?id=s75 http://www.tradekay.com/productlist.asp?id=s75 (JEANS) http://www.tradekay.com/productlist.asp?id=s69 http://www.tradekay.com/productlist.asp?id=s69 (HANDBAGS) http://www.tradekay.com/productlist.asp?id=s57 http://www.tradekay.com/productlist.asp?id=s57 (sunglass)

doulaimi 17y ago

groaner 17y ago

Perhaps we can expect more of this in the future: "We didn't know the Onion was not a real news site." http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/8237558.stm http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/8237558.stm

gamble 17y ago
My first reaction on reading this article was wondering whether it came from The Onion...

qeorge 17y ago

The likelihood of news jobs going overseas aside, I would enjoy a more global flavor to news in the United States. I often find the BBC's take on current events illuminating, and I'd be interested in quality coverage from other parts of the globe.

nzmsv 17y ago

This has been tried with tech support. A lot of companies that did this have since moved call centres back to North America. Why? Because the customers revolted. So the only thing this will achieve is to speed the death of the newspaper. Instead of differentiating themselves from all the spamblogs out there they seek to join them. They seem to not understand that the only purpose of those is to game Google rankings, which don't exist on paper.