New Haven Advocate

Eric Kallgren    Boulder Colorado USA

Posted at 12:19am on Tuesday, June 2nd, 2009

The New Haven Advocate published an issue made in India as a "newsprint version of performance art", the New York Times reported on May 31, 2009:

"Alert readers of The New Haven Advocate and its sister publications in Hartford and Fairfield County may have noticed a consistency among the bylines in its newest issue: Annie Rani, Dev Das, Nidhi Sharma, Asmi Rana, Neha Bhayana, Shreya Sanghani, Vijeta Bhatia and others.

Or, alert or inert, they could just have figured things out from the cover: “Sorry, We’ve Been Outsourced — This Issue Was Made in India.” Almost all the stories in the alternative weekly, it turned out, were written by journalists in India.

Outsourcing journalism, one could ask, menace or peril? It might not be the only question, but New Haven is a particularly good place to pose it.

The Advocate, the usual alternative weekly mix of listings, personal ads, entertainment news and local reporting, wasn’t the first publication to wonder whether you could do local journalism without local journalists.

The question arose last year when an online publication in Pasadena, Calif., fired its seven staff members and replaced them with workers from India using Webcams and e-mail at $7.50 per thousand words.

The idea in Connecticut wasn’t nearly so predatory. The Indian journalists, recruited through Craigslist ads in Bangalore and Mumbai, were paid The Advocate’s normal freelance rates (which definitely weren’t making anyone rich either) to report on food, art, music, sex and other topics of interest in New Haven. The intent wasn’t to cut costs. It was to see if it could be done and, if so, what kind of journalism would result.

“The idea was for the newsprint version of performance art, and I mean that positively,” said Joshua Mamis, publisher of the three papers."

The full story:
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/01/nyregion/01towns.html?ref=world