Outsourced Careers Now Includes Journalism

Posted on November 28, 2006

Outsourcing continues to expand to new industries as more companies look for ways to offshore jobs to other countries where hiring workers is considerably cheaper. India has been one of the most frequent places for companies to look for cheaper labor. An article from the International Herald Tribune explains how the offshoring practice has expanded to include the journalism profession. The article says Reuters is one of the media companies offshoring jobs to India.

More than two years ago, Reuters, the financial news service, opened a new center in Bangalore. The 340 employees, including an editorial team of 13 local journalists, was deployed to write about corporate earnings and broker research on U.S. companies. Since then, the Reuters staff at the center has grown to about 1,600, with 100 journalists working on U.S. stories.
The company has also moved photo editing work from Canada and Washington, D.C., to Singapore.
More expansion is planned in India, according to David Schlesinger, Reuters global managing editor, who said that costs were significantly lower in India, although the competition to recruit financial journalists there was increasing.
The system has "allowed us to really increase the breadth of companies that we cover," Schlesinger said. "One of the problems with the U.S. equities universe is that there are so many companies, and this has allowed us to cover so many more than we could before. And it's allowed us to increase our depth because it's freed up reporters in New York to do more."

There does not seem to be an industry that has been spared from offshoring.