Joe Grimm at Detroit Free Press has written a very interesting article here. It might be pointing to a future few of us imagined.

Offshoring: Coming Trend for Copy Desks?

"Another company, Cicada Media in Bangalore, India, focuses on corporate and marketing communications. It offers to correct errors in grammar, spelling, usage and style, and to proofread."

I'm sure many Indian editors have a better grasp of the Engish language than some of their American counterparts.

But how many reporters and editors don't want their choice of language challenged when it's wrong? I've gotten countless "it's fine the way it is" responses from the city desk when I've questioned use of slang, cliches or potentially libelous writing, especially in ledes.

I agree with Peter Fisk, who said on Romanesko that newspaper managers who advocate offshoring copy desks have no functional knowledge of what copy editors do -- or try to do. They're looking for someone to catch stray commas and correct misspellings, not uphold standards and keep their employers from being sued.

**Offshoring**

Isn't there some rule against verbing nouns? If not, there oughta be.

Nope. Nor against verbing adjectives, far as I know.

I understand why some people are annoyed by the "verbing" of adjectives, but the reality (to me) is that it reflects how people commonly speak nowadays and is becoming a part of our evolving language. I'm not sure that it's a battle worth fighting.

Back to the topic at hand ... is anybody pricing bungalows in Bangalore yet? Or least contemplating getting out of this business sometime in the next decade? Things like this are starting to convince me that many of our jobs just won't exist in 10 years, and those of us who do have jobs won't be doing them in any way akin to the way we do them today.

I suspect I'm going to be doing something else for a living by the time I'm 50. (I'm 44 now.) And I'm not too sure it will be my choice.

Nor against adjectivizing nouns. Nor against nouning verbs. We can agree that verbing articles is a no-no.

I went to a Guild function in Victoria last year that featured a workshop on the very real threat of offshoring.

It is asinine for a newspaper to think copy editing jobs can be done offshore. One of the things we do, of course, is prevent local embarrassments, like street names or names of towns or officials being incorrect. I doubt much of that would be caught by a "copy editor' in Pakistan.

Reuters was at least talking about offshoring its cutline-writing. I am not sure if they have gone through with it.

OK, so this is a frightening thread.

My paper is family-owned, and even though it's the only game in town, and we have been told its circulation has been trending downward for the past few years, there is absolutely no talk of impending financial doom or layoffs. So I guess we are fortunate.

But I'm curious about Wab's premise of buying a bungalow in Bangalore. Let's assume a U.S. citizen copy editor for a U.S. newspaper has the inclination and ability to forsake the U.S. and live in India, and his or her job is outsourced there. Would the newspaper (or whatever operation is running its India outpost) even consider the U.S. employee for work there? Or would the laughable wages render even consideration of such a move a nonstarter, because even if one did move and get one's old job, one couldn't afford to live on the salary, even in India?

I do hold dual citizenship with Ireland, so I guess I could always work there.

My dual citizenship is with Alabama, so I am out of luck.

In answer to wordy gurdy's inquiry, it's fairly common for Australian and New Zealand citizens to work in Asia under such deals, notably in Thailand, China and Vietnam. Many find the experience miserable.

I'm curious about why? I've been to all those countries, and I imagine it would be anything but miserable.

Interesting, Paul. Thanks.

There are many offshore call centers (or "customer service centers") set ups here-- you call the 1-800 number and it connects you to an underpaid, ununionized, English-speaker here. These call centers hire qualified legal residents, including foreigners like Americans. The only ones that really pay well are those servicing the online gambling companies, which are here to skirt the law in the US, and some of them get their employees by recruiting in the US.
Of course, living in a vacation paradise like Costa Rica would probably be more alluring than Bangalore.
Somethings should probably be done locally, however. I doubt even an America copy editor here would know who the head coach of your local high school football team is or if your town has a "strong mayor" or "city manager" type of government.

I made the mistake of ordering Earthlink DSL and compounded the mistake by installing it on Saturday. After four days of dealing with tech support based in India to at least try to get my dial-up restored, I invited a computer-savvy friend over last night, and he fixed everything in 20 minutes.

I'm a patient person, but dealing with "Joe" and "Steve" on the other side of the world taught me the limits of Zen.

Not specifically about copy editing, but I have seen numerous complaints by foreign workers in China about things like not being paid the agreed-on salary (or at all), vastly increased workload, the employer not completing required government paperwork - that sort of thing.

Gee...funny what happens to workers with a lack of government regulations...

In short, culture shock and pay rates. Political matters can prove inconvenient also. People from Australia and New Zealand are used to employing fairly vigorous language in the press. Recall Carlyles attribution of words to Burke:
Edmund Burke said that there were three Estates in Parliament, but in the Reporters' Gallery yonder, there sat a fourth Estate more important than they all. These words were writ large on the exterior walls of the first daily newspaper I worked for.

The whole point of offshoring is to pay people less and give them crappier benefits or no benefits. Offshoring is going to increase, even if it hurts quality. It doesn't take that much money to train someone who's literate in English to figure out how not to get sued, even if that copy editor lives in India and is learning about U.S. libel laws. As for mistakes specific to a local area, those are problems newspaper stockholders are willing to live with. So most regional newspapers will be less well edited, and a few papers -- like the NYT -- will hold up their standards more or less. So there will be increased competition for a few good journalism jobs in the United States.

The reasons many Westerners hate working in overseas news media: Pay often sucks (if it arrives at all) and most Westerners are used to living to another standard. It's expensive to live like a Westerner in a non-Western place -- eating Western packaged foods, driving around in a private car, reading Western books, for instance. Unless you like living native, it's not realistic to work in many non-Western settings on what news media typically pays. And if you have kids, you'd need to make a lot more money to send them to private "international schools" -- places where they teach in English. Most transplanted kids can't just go attend a local school because of language, for starters. Typically, Westerners who work in Asia are there for short-term adventure. Unless you work overseas for a major outlet like the NYT or WashPost, the pay doesn't afford much Western-ish lifestyle. Meanwhile, you're typically breathing dirtier air, walking around filthier streets, living in much more crowded and noisier conditions, and such. Visiting as a tourist is not the same as living and working there, especially as relatively well-paid Westerners visiting such places.

I'm not so sure about that. Most of what I know about how not to get sued I've picked up by paying attention to what the lawyers take out of sensitive stories before we run them. Will copy editors in Bangalore have access to all the previous incarnations of something they're editing?

If they pay copy editors in Bangalore one-quarter what they pay you and me, they can give copy editors plenty of access -- computerized histories of stories and such.

At my last paper, we flew in lawyers from NYC to give workshops. (Don't ask me why.) Those same lawyers can fly to Bangalore if needed. If you and I can consult with a lawyer in the U.S. by phone, so can someone from Bangalore. They could even have an American lawyer live in Bangalore for a contracted period, at a much cheaper cost than having news desks full of copy editors in the U.S. They rotate Western lawyers seeking adventure, they have cheap copy editors who learn libel.

They save on your and my pay, benefits, Social Security, pension or 401(k) and so on. Don't underestimate how much they save. Plus, turnover would be much less. (Our jobs are seen as very cushy in many non-Western countries. And job satisfaction typically is a luxury of a well-fed nation.) Suddenly, no moving costs, much less retraining, etc.

Still seems penny-wise and pound-foolish to me. They'd have to save an army of copy editors' salaries just to pay for one libel suit. Much of copy editing is knowing what questions to ask, and that's not something that's easy to teach, at least not in my experience.

They'd teach copy editors about libel the same way they teach new copy editors anywhere. Think about all the small papers where they teach new kids. Western copy editors can keep clinging to the notion that one libel suit is going to keep all our jobs intact. That's not borne out by the behavior of stockholders.

They don't even have to ship all our jobs offshore to reduce most of our lifestyles. They could send them to a hub in Arkansas, Texas or wherever the cost of living is cheaper than where you and I are now.

Stop it, you're scaring me...

Seriously, what I don't get about the race to the bottom line is, once no one's earning a living wage anymore, who's gonna buy all the products that keep the engine of capitalist growth going? It's just so phenomenally shortsighted and stupid, it's breathtaking.

The rich keep making money at the expense of the middle class here, for instance. But the middle class is growing in places like China and India. Their middle class is buying TVs and cars. But they don't have our standard of living in Social Security, 401(k)s and such. The sales pitch for world trade is raising living standards in developing countries. They don't mention that they are gutting your and my lifestyles in the process. Your reaction -- don't scare me -- is one I've heard in various newsrooms. But we have plenty of examples of workers -- in the auto industry, for instance -- who didn't see the future coming. The people who laid them off did fine afterward. The ones who were laid off, you know that story.

Those of us who aren't within several years of retirement should prepare ourselves to switch industries if necessary. It doesn't mean we should all jump ship immediately. It just means our futures won't be completely in the hands of others. What I notice about people when job cuts loom: It's the ones who've been caught short who suffer the most. In other instances, I've seen people completely happy to be bought out or laid off. Those people had other plans.

I'm still a couple of decades from retirement, but my mortgage will be paid off in about 12 years. (My husband and I are probably the only people in the entire country who refinanced to a *higher* payment when the rates dropped to "historic lows"--we switched from a 30-yr fixed to a 15-yr fixed and are saving a quarter of a million dollars in interest payments over the life of the loan.) I figure that'll give me a lot more flexibility, assuming I make it till then. But still, it's sad to see what's happening to younger people coming up.

I've made decent money in newspapers and invested well. But the best investment I've made is in skills that would allow me to leave newspapers tomorrow if necessary. Anyone in newspapers can do that.

If I could just interject for a moment...

One of the most important aspects of a copy editor's job is communication, whether with the city editor, reporter, managing editor, etc. Without it (trust me on this, I worked as an editor at a remote production plant), you are dooming yourself to poor quality and low morale, because no one talks to each other and everyone gets a misguided sense of what everyone else does.

Imagine some faceless copy editor making changes on a whim without ever explaining or even communicating with the principles involved or being held accountable. I doubt anyone would subject themselves to that environment for long.

That is why our jobs will be safe for the time-being. You may not think it makes much of a difference if you're editing next to everyone else or in a remote location, but try it once and see.

I've done it across an ocean. It works if you've got a good system. That's the key.

Since this is the testy copy editors' board, I hope you don't mind me injecting more pessmism:



Who's to say they won't get rid of them all? Plenty of papers have copy editors in name only. What they really do is write headlines, build pages, trim and fill, and if you read the story that's a side benefit. More often than not, you're reading a proof -- and how likely are you to pull a story when it's already on the page.

Or start having reporters write the headlines. They're already filing for the Web, then refiling for the paper. And a story has been read by a couple of layers of editors already, so who needs a third? Especially when that layer is getting health benefits.



I can more than imagine that. It happens plenty now.

Yup, already happening. Look at the Orange County Register, for instance. They've done that previously at the Sacramento Bee, though I dunno whether that's still the case. And if everything goes online, goodbye to most designers.

I don't see it as being pessimistic to prepare for the worst possibilities. For instance, I buy insurance even though I hope the worst won't happen.

I do most of my work with people who work many miles from my office. Member #1's views on Telecommuting for Copy Editors You Know It Makes Sense inspire me. I'm just waiting for the communications infrastructure to catch up. What's more crucial is that from time to time you get your feet on the ground in the communities you serve.

How practical that is depends on whether your readers or users are local, national or international. Nowadays, we're talking about more and more global users. So wherever you are can be part of your readership. Right now, I'm considering career alternatives for which there is no "here" or "there" exactly. In the past, I've worked for a company with a global reach.

I really should update the telecommuting story. I've been doing it for nearly four years now.

Just got high-speed Internet, and I work at least the first couple hours from home a couple nights week so I can keep an eye on my son while my wife makes her way home from work. We can't communicate or budget, so working from home actually works a lot better than being in office since I'm removed from most of that frustration. And the stories aren't hitting the rim and getting head specs until two hours after I get to work anyway.

Still, I do have a job interview next week with a company for communications work.

Thank you for the "typically."

I moved from New York to Asia some years ago. My city has much better air quality and much less traffic. I commute by mountain bike in 15 minutes in most seasons. I live a 5-minutes' walk from the excellent subway system. Sixty percent of the city is forested mountains; I hike often. There are grizzlies within the city limits. There are hot springs, too. My apartment is bigger than where I lived in New York. There is a world heritage site several hours east by car. The city is a Winter Olympic host with some of the best powder in Asia. The food is excellent, and you have your choice of local fare, European food and countless other cuisines. My coworkers are the finest people I’ve ever worked with.

It's challenging living in another country, but there are certainly compensations. In fairness, I should note that my editing is not for a news organization, so what is true for me would not be true for someone on the newsier side of editing. Also, I have no kids.

If I recall, you are in Japan. Japan is not a country where jobs are being offshored to. Jobs are being offshored away from it. We were clearly speaking of countries that are on the receiving end of jobs, countries with low costs of living.

Into which field would you recommend copy editors transition? I have a bachelor's degree in communications but not much experience doing much else.

Don't say "plastics."

Heck, you don't even have to be in a remote location for misunderstandings to arise via communication that doesn't take place face to face. So much information gets lost when you can't see a person's facial expressions when they're communicating with you; hence the use of emoticons in e-mail and chatrooms. We are mammals, after all, and the areas of our brains that are devoted to face recognition are there for a reason. We even have an expression for it in English, namely "face time." It's always interesting to me whenever we have a staff retreat to try to match the names to the faces of the foreign correspondents based on how I've pictured them from our phone or e-mail interactions.

That was the original focus of the thread. You then commented more broadly on "Westerners...working overseas in news media" and "non-Western place[s]."

If I was unclear, please read the paragraph I wrote directly before the one you excerpted from. If you want to dice my message, I'm not interested in pursuing that conversation. I grew up in the Asia Pacific region and have been to Japan several times. I don't need a travelogue.

wordygurdy: Threads past have suggested careers such as tech editing, teaching, PR and so on. Hunting up such threads might give you a start.

Personally, I wouldn't want most jobs that journalists transition to. I suggest taking inventory of your strengths and figuring out what you'd think would be worth doing every day. That can vary widely for people. My brother and I were both raised to appreciate details and to take great care. He's a financial auditor at a top research university, which might seem very different from copy editing. But essentially, we both look for mistakes and correct things on deadline. We also interact with many people to get tasks done.

I know my strengths and what would get me up in the morning. I like pressure, I like coming up with solutions quickly, I like seeing possibilities that aren't obvious, I like juggling many things, I like to constantly learn, I think entrepreneurially, I'm good at organizing, I like to motivate and help people, I'm good at rolling with changes. With that in mind, I regularly look at online job sites, scoping out what else I might be good at. That approach differs from saying: Hmm, I've got a journalism degree. What else could I do with words? To me, that approach is narrow, and I'm interested in broadening my career choices. And practically speaking, two people with identical communications degrees might be suited for completely different jobs, based on their temperaments, strengths and weaknesses, work ethic and such.

I still have a lot of fun at work and prefer to stay in news, something I pursued single-mindedly early on. But at my first job out of college, I saw nearly two dozen people get canned (to their surprise) when our chain bought another with overlapping circulation and cheaper journalists. I saw that just working hard and trusting others to protect our jobs leaves us vulnerable. And one thing that makes me a good journalist: I'm not trusting. So the whole time I've been building a newspaper career, I've been laying out escape routes and taking advantage of our schedules as copy editors -- having nearly a whole day free before work. In that time, I've taught, taken grad classes at employers' expense, paid for tech classes out of pocket, done volunteer work and otherwise explored things that interest me. There are many things I could do and enjoy. For the past year, I've been building a startup with a few like-minded people, based almost entirely on sweat equity. It might succeed; it might not. But I'm learning things that keep varying my resume.

My general goal in life is not to get rich, but to make my own choices. What are your priorities? Sometimes, it helps to work things like a maze -- start from the end point and work your way back to the beginning. You can avoid dead ends that way.

It's best spent with loved ones. That's also a key factor in the disenchantment of some who work overseas for a time.

Interesting, copynomad. Thanks for the perspective.

I rather liked Nessie3's travelogue, though.

If you like that kinda thing, here are reams of it:

Click here

I think most people here can distinguish between testy and snarky.

Wasn't meant to be snarky. If someone's interested in working overseas, there's cool stuff to look at online. If you're not interested, skip it. But others might like this kinda thing.

FYI, in case this hasn't been mentioned yet.

http://sadbastards.wordpress.com/

*By Mick Gregory
Citizen Journalist at Large*

Anyone care to suggest anothe r source for consideration of this matter?

Hi,
I am new to this forum. I have been a copy editor for 10 years now, and have always been curious about what the other side (the Westerners) thought of us. This thread made an interesting read.

It has been quite a few years since editing (books and journals) has been offshored to our country. Initially, we did get the jobs based on our competitive prices! But our clients are happy with our work and have no qualms about sending in more.

I too would like to see how we handle the newspapers.[/img][/list]