I made some reference recently to not being impressed by Maureen Dowd, and I thought maybe today would be a nice time to show why. So I did a little running commentary on her column from Saturday's New York Times, "A Penny for My Thoughts?" My comments are not indented; her column is. Here we go:
I visited a journalism school, and they said your first line makes no sense.
The newspaper business is not only crumpling up, James Macpherson informed me here, it is probably holding “a one-way ticket to Bangalore.”
A). Where is here? The future? New York? B). Is today the day that we want to be using Indian city names out of context to represent a bad future? My thought is no. C). Is the newspaper business in this metaphor a personified newspaper with little papery arms? What else is capable of holding a ticket and being crumpled?
Macpherson — bow-tied and white-haired but boyish-looking at 53 — should know. He pioneered “glocal” news — outsourcing Pasadena coverage to India at Pasadena Now, his daily online “newspaperless,” as he likes to call it. Indians are writing about everything from the Pasadena Christmas tree-lighting ceremony to kitchen remodeling to city debates about eliminating plastic shopping bags.
So... the guy who is currently profiting from this is the expert on it? This is like interviewing the CEO of Fannie Mae about whether people should be buying real estate. Also, we have another name for a "daily online 'newspaperless,'" here in the wilds of the interwebs: we call this "a Web site."
“Everyone has to get ready for what’s inevitable — like King Canute and the tide coming in — and that’s really my message to the industry,” the editor and publisher said. “Many newspapers are dead men walking. They’re going to be replaced by smaller, nimbler, multiple Internet-centric kinds of things such as what I’m pioneering.”
I have to say, if Macpherson is approaching everyone in the newspaper industry with his boyish bowtie-ness and his adorable references to the King of All England (and Demark and the Norwegians and some of the Swedes), well, it's no wonder he's gotten his cause onto the editorial page of the New York Times. Who can resist? And since there's nothing else going on in the world...
I wondered how long it would be before some guy in Bangalore was writing my column about President Obama.
Can we take a vote?
“In brutal terms,” said Macpherson, whose father was a typesetter, printer and photographer, “it’s going to get to the point where saving the industry may require some people losing their jobs. The newspaper industry is coming to a General Motors moment — except there’s no one to bail them out.” He said it would be “irresponsible” for newspapers not to explore offshoring options.
OH MY GOSH. This bit of insight about newspapers cutting jobs is so striking, so prescient, it's like it's already happened! Or like someone's already written about how newspapers deserve a bail-out! WOW! I don't know who to be more impressed with, here, Macpherson and his crystal ball or Dowd and her ability to find the last person on Earth who's caught on to the fact that the newspaper business is in decline.
He said he got the idea to outsource about a year ago, sitting in his Pasadena home, where he puts out Pasadena Now with his wife, Candice Merrill. Macpherson had worked in the ’90s for designers like Richard Tyler and Alan Flusser, and had outsourced some of his clothing manufacturing to Vietnam.
Move over, John McCain. Maureen Dowd has found a real American hero.
So, he thought, “Where can I get people who can write the word for less?” In a move that sounded so preposterous it became a Stephen Colbert skit, he put an ad on Craigslist for Indian reporters and got a flood of responses.
I will buy a donut for the person who can find this skit, as I can't seem to pull it up on YouTube or at ColbertNation. Sadly, I will have to outsource delivery of the donut to my camera.
He fired his seven Pasadena staffers — including five reporters — who were making $600 to $800 a week, and now he and his wife direct six employees all over India on how to write news and features, using telephones, e-mail, press releases, Web harvesting and live video streaming from a cellphone at City Hall.
Also -- is it outsourcing if you still have sources in the original place? Like a guy and his wife and their legion of internet amazery?
“I pay per piece, just the way it was in the garment business,” he says. “A thousand words pays $7.50.”
At this point, were I interviewing Outsourcy MacBowtie, I would have asked something along the lines of, "So -- you pay these folks? Have you considered the free citizen journalism available via the bloggers of your fair city?" I might have even done some kind of Google search to see if Pasadena Now has a decent Web site (eh), or if the news of the city is better covered elsewhere (like by the Pasadena Star-News, circulation: 30,000). But it turns out I'm not Maureen Dowd, because my thoughts occasionally turn outward:
A penny for your thoughts? Now I knew my days were numbered.
I forgot! This column isn't going to be about the whys and hows of the newspaper industry's ongoing commercial problems, or even about the ethical versus economic concerns of outsourcing: it's going to be about Maureen Dowd! I was distracted by the bow-tie, I guess, and the fancy use of quotes that lulled me into thinking there was reporting going on.
I checked in with one of his workers in Mysore City in southern India, 40-year-old G. Sreejayanthi, who puts together Pasadena events listings. She said she had a full-time job in India and didn’t think of herself as a journalist. “I try to do my best, which need not necessarily be correct always,” she wrote back. “Regarding Rose Bowl, my first thought was it was related to some food event but then found that is related to Sports field.”
See, here again, I feel like there's reporting going on, because I'm told that Ms. Dowd has gone to the trouble of actually placing a phone call and talking to someone. Then again, maybe if there were real reporting going on, Dowd could have asked about whether Ms. Sreejayanthi doesn't consider herself a journalist even though she seems to be actively advertising for freelance writing work on GetAFreelancer.com. But it's soooooo much cuter if you make it seem like the person you're talking to is unethical or dumb than if you actually try and catch them in contradictions, or do any tiny bit of homework on your own.
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?
How significant is what? Has something been lost in the translation here, too, like the significance of clear antecedents for your pronouns? Does he mean how significant is it that two two African-American lawmakers walked out in protest, or how significant is it that his reporters missed it via Web cam, or how significant is it that sometimes the news is wrong? Or something else entirely? Man, if only there was someone like a well-paid writer or an editor who could've cleaned up these words before they hit the page. But I hear it's hard to find good help in the U.S. anymore...
At first the reaction to covering Pasadena from 8,000 miles away and 13.5 hours ahead was “absolutely brutal,” Macpherson recalled. Journalism professors keened and Larry Wilson, the public editor at The Pasadena Star-News, called it “nutty.”
Yeah, check out this savage reaction from the Huffington Post, where Barbara Ehrenreich wrote about this outsourcing a year and a half ago (which would seem, strangely, to be before Dowd says Macpheson thought of the idea in his kitchen): "In the Pasadena case, I can't even complain, as U.S.-based Reuters' workers did when their jobs were outsourced, that the quality of journalism will suffer as a result. One of the Indian reporters just hired by pasadenanow.com has a degree from the Graduate School of Journalism at U.C. Berkeley, which is one of the three or four best j-schools in the country. I have taught there myself, and know that the students are scarily smart. Too bad that they these reporters couldn't get real journalism jobs, at normal American wages, but American newspapers are axing good journalists even as I write."
See how the criticism at the end, there, is thoughtful and aimed at a wider situation? But clearly, it's punchier just to quote Larry Wilson out of context (his full quote from the L.A. Times is here)1 than to get into the sticky rhetorical situation of engaging in an actual argument.
But then in October, Dean Singleton, The Associated Press’s chairman and the head of the MediaNews Group — which counts The Pasadena Star-News, The Denver Post and The Detroit News in its stable of 54 daily newspapers — told the Southern Newspaper Publishers Association that his company was looking into outsourcing almost every aspect of publishing, including possibly having one news desk for all of his papers, “maybe even offshore.”
OK. Did I skip a paragraph? Surely, someone -- maybe an evil outsourced editor! -- has cut off the elegant sentences where Dowd constructs an artful transition from talking about a Web site in Pasadena that uses freelance writers out of India for what basically passes as data-entry reporting to talking about how physical newspapers are considering consolidating their copy-editing and graphic design desks, because I'm sure she didn't mean to imply that The Denver Post is going to start reporting live from Bangalore, did she? No. She wouldn't just put facts next to each other and hope we infer the worst. Who would do such a thing?
Noting that most preproduction work for MediaNews’s papers in California is already outsourced to India, cutting costs by 65 percent, Singleton advised, “If you need to offshore it, offshore it,” and said after the speech, “In today’s world, whether your desk is down the hall or around the world, from a computer standpoint, it doesn’t matter.”
I didn't invite Dean Singleton over for Thanksgiving dinner, I'll admit, and I doubt I ever will. But I also didn't dress him up as Darth Vader on Halloween, and it's kind of weird to see Maureen Dowd doing it now. The guy has some big scary ideas, many of them probably wrong and many of them controversial, about how to run the newspaper business, but earlier this year he also gave a speech in Europe saying "Sure, economic performance is important. After-all, without solid earnings you can’t fund future growth. But there is also a greater calling to us all. Newspapers are the cornerstone of democracies everywhere. We owe it to our countries to succeed in navigating a new newspaper model." I'd just like to point out that if anyone in the automotive industry, to steal Mr. Macpherson's comparison from before, had given a search-the-soul-of-the-industry speech like this or like the one Dowd is quoting a few years ago, that person would be getting the Congressional Medal of Unbelievable Courage right now.
And Singleton uses the word "local" fifteen times in that speech, as in, "We have the greatest ability of any of our media competitors to create local content." Which just sounds like he's dying to outsource reporting to me.
Macpherson feels “vindicated,” but also “conflicted” about the idea of having an American newspaper industry fueled by Indian labor. “I mean, I am an American too,” he said. “I had two ancestors in the Revolutionary War. My mother was in the Daughters of the American Revolution.”
Again, ha, how awkward, my New York Times was apparently delivered with a sentence or eight missing, because I totally don't have a paragraph here where anyone says that the entire American newspaper industry is going to move to India. Can I borrow a copy from someone else?
It’s not easy being a visionary, he said: “I have essentially been five years ahead of the world for a long time, and that’s a horrible address at which to live because people look at you, you know, like you’re nuts.”
Though apparently, pasadenanow.com isn't such a bad address to be at, because people all over are putting his name out into the press. I bet his ad rates have sky rocketed. Oh! Oh! Wait! I get it! This whole thing is a benefit column! Maureen Dowd: Saving the Newspaper Industry, One Plagiarizing News Site at a Time. Maybe next week she'll write about those plucky youngsters atYahoo! I hear they could use a little more traffic.
1 Hey, by the way, it turns out that Dowd's exemplar, Pasadena Now, is charged with out-right plagiarism by the Pasadena Star-News. Do you think that has anything to do with their tiny local staffing? I wish someone had asked...TIP:
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Comments
Maureen Dowd is one of the few women who has a major regular politcal opinion column at a major editorial page at a major newspaper. You can count the number of them maybe on more than one hand, certainly no need to employ the toes. That there are so few is sincerely shameful. That Dowd has the privilege to be counted among them despite the fact that the qualityof her writing is so poor and her analysis so lacking in insight just makes me mad.
Saturn, I'd be all for lobbying the Times to have you replace Dowd in a heartbeat. Your work is quite frankly better than hers.
If Maureen is outsourced… make sure it is somewhere where there is not satellite link-up, so she can keep her thoughts to herself.
after Bush. But then she just got so mean spirited.
Maybe this the example of how she has "jumped the shark." She
seems to have nothing left to say. I think she does have talent
however. She probably could use a loooong vacation. Maybe
take a sabbatical and go help people in Africa or anywhere
where there is suffering. Get out of those Manolo Blahniks
and open up her heart.
At first, I thought Mysore City must be a fictional place, and to be some sort of slur. But in fact it actually exists (146 km southwest of Bangalore); it only sounds like a slur. But then I wondered if Dowd chose it because it sounded like a slur; later in the paragraph, she tries, with the quoted Indian journalist from Mysore City, to drive home the slur, by having the Indian "source" speak with an absence of articles and comically out-of-order phrasing. Or maybe I'm giving Dowd too much credit.
What I can say about any work where cost savings are supposedly achieved by abstracting a career path or complex job into piece work is that (1) quality must still be monitored (or not), either raising the cost or producing a lower quality product, and (2) contract staff generally take a piece work approach, whether they be local or remote, and cannot be counted on either to multi-task or to embody the goals and values of the organization who commissions their work.
This is a brilliant deconstruction, Saturn! Wait: I already told you that.
Deserves repeating.
Annoyed as I was, I continued to read her column until I saw the same type of fiction about John Kerry in the '04 race and at that point I went cold turkey on her columns and your post is the first I have seen of her columns even though I have the print edition of the Times in my home everyday. How's that for avoiding a column--even when it's on a page I'm reading? Bit by bit, she is outsourcing herself to oblivion.
This is a mild column compared to some of the dreck she wrote about the political scene this year and in past presidential election years. She used to do major harm but she's been losing validity with thinking folks and was never read that much by others. It's what's between the lines as well as what's in them that sinks her.
As I mentioned before here, at a Miami Book Fair three years ago when the rest of us were knocking ourselves out with presentations, she drew a huge crowd and read notes only and everyone was hugely disappointed. She seemed totally disengaged and self-centered.
Like many here, I've stopped reading her.
It reminds me of a time when I talked to someone who was going to hand in a badly argued paper as school writing assignment. “It makes no logical sense,” I noted. “It doesn't matter,” said the person who probably didn't even know how the logic was broken and couldn't fix it, “it will convince the teacher.” Since the bar with the teacher was not higher, the person had become convinced that the goal was merely the convincing and not the construction of valid arguments. There's an ethical conundrum for you.
A great deal of the Republican campaign for the Presidency was done this way, it seems to me, though perhaps they would say the same of the Democratic campaign. Political argument tends to have a Machiavellian edge. If I could say words that would get people charged up about Climate Change, I'm not so sure it would matter to me if they were logical words. The issue matters. I just don't want people doing it about issues that don't matter. And, it should go without saying, that my personal judgment is always right—isn't yours? :)
You won't make a bad column go away by arguing that it's a bad column. You'll make it go away by offering better. And, frankly, I think yours is better, but then, I don't read Dowd regularly. I just like her as a guest on Bill Maher, and I liked the parts of Bushworld I had time to read, although mostly because she seemed “connected” and knew things (or was willing to say she did) that others did not. But the Supreme Court has opined that the answer to bad speech is more speech, so the question isn't why she's at the Times, the question is why you're not... and, of course, how are you going to get there?
(I don't even know where to start on the actual topic that underlies the article you took apart. I'll make some notes for other days.)
American business owners should be given tax credits for employing American workers and should pay excise taxes of 1000% on the wages paid to offshore employees.
Outsourcy MacBowtie should be punched in the nose.
Brilliant commentary. You're right, it is always about Mo.
Five Donuts! Rated within the first five paragraphs.
Excellent parsing of that column, which must have been outsourced to the Chinese hinterlands. Oh for the days of Anna Quindlen gracing the pages of the NYT.
Thanks for this.
Gm -- ha! That's not outsourcing, that's exile (and not a bad plan, at that...)
Dakini, I think you're right, she does have talent -- which is what makes the waste of it so much sadder and frustrating.
Rich, yeah, I think she was working hard to make the worker -- and the town -- sound ridiculous. Your breakdown of issues of outsourcing is much more insightful than what's found here, by the way -- thanks for your thoughts. I always appreciate them.
Grif, I'm generally with you on Frank Rich. Sorry he's not around to help combat the cold this weekend. Stay warm!
Designator, I stopped reading for a while, but now it's like a train wreck -- I can't look away, you know? I'd guess it's going to get harder to watch in the coming years for me, as she'll turn her fictive attacks on Obama instead of Bush.
JRDog: Yes! Film at 11.
Lea, that anecdote is great, and it captures a lot of my trouble with Dowd's work -- she's resting on the laurels she's earned at the NYT.
Kent, yeah, the thing I tend to forget when I get most frustrated with Dowd is that she is a pot-stirrer by profession. But she uses the formal devices of reporting -- interviews, discussion of sources, lots of reference to being connected -- in a way that makes it seem like she's doing more. I don't think she's writing to an end, or at least she hasn't been in the last few years, beyond making sure she's saying things so loudly that they get attention. If it was in service of an ideology... maybe it would be better. But I'm happy to keep throwing words at her.
Dorsey, thanks!
Xanadu -- I'm not going there. I don't know anything about Maureen Dowd personally and I don't have any problems with her as a person (and, Greengirl, I'm not sure what's coming across as too personal, here, but I certainly don't mean to cast aspersions on anything but her current work and work methods).
Ben, she certainly does hate the Clintons, you're right.
Great piece
Rated
Lonnie, see, that's an actual issue proposal I could get behind, or at least argue. Maybe you should be on the NYT page.
Greengirl, I think she's been a fine pundit in the past, and like you say, the ability seems to still be there. I wish there was a bit more attention or time paid to the columns, like you say.
Al, were I paid by the word (or at all), I'd say more than just "I'm not."
Thanks, Big Ol', Michael, and Yablonowitz.
And Bbd -- I didn't even know it was up there! Thanks for the heads-up, and the kind comment. I do miss Anna Q., too.
I've written too many rants about MoDo over the years. I only wish I had written this one.
Re: At first the reaction to covering Pasadena from 8,000 miles away and 13.5 hours ahead was “absolutely brutal,” Macpherson recalled.
I'm not sure whether I'm more bothered by the dissonant geography or by the attempt to report from the future. Surely, there must be a physicist reading this blog who can reassure us. Or not.
Finally, if MoDo is eventually to be outsourced, I'm hoping that Barbara Ehrenreich can establish a virtual address in India, and just pretend to report from 8000 miles away and 13.5 hours in the future. That would be some interesting-- and even more prescient!--reading. On that very valuable NYT journalistic real estate.
KTM, I can't explain the geography problem, either, but I like your Barbara Ehrenreich idea very much.
But she's probably happy for the publicity you're giving her. Controversy in the opinion business is mostly always good.
I hate to break up this groupthink adulation, but I read Maureen Dowd's article this morning and it was, hello, a FEATURE story.
As someone who was in the newspaper business for longer than I care to remember, I thought her "column" was a pretty interesting feature story actually. I personally was unaware -- and astounded -- that a California newspaper was using people in India to write news about California.
There is considerable evidence that you just didn't get that this article was essentially a feature story. For example, you write "So... the guy who is currently profiting from this is the expert on it? This is like interviewing the CEO of Fannie Mae about whether people should be buying real estate."
Not every article can -- nor should -- be an earth-shattering article analyzing the positive and negative impact of a societal trend, news development, etc. Sometimes, the show, not tell, philosophy works better in writing.
And while I really appreciate the effort it takes to research every fact in the story so you can ascertain when journalism outsourcing was born and other matters, there is a word for your sentence-by-sentence deconstruction of her article. Here it is -- "OBSESSION."
And I'm guessing that you've never been a copy editor. You'd have writers -- and editors who want the newspaper printed -- throwing stuff at you. And you'd deserve it.
Here's another guess based on my reading of your past work -- you just don't like Maureen Dowd because she isn't liberal enough for you.
I truly apologize if you are upset that this post doesn't comport with the adulatory blogs that you are accustomed to reading.
Shalom,
ZWrite
ZWrite, you say, Not every article can -- nor should -- be an earth-shattering article analyzing the positive and negative impact of a societal trend, news development, etc. Sometimes, the show, not tell, philosophy works better in writing.
I agree completely. It's why the New York Times Magazine and the Style section and even the front page include feature stories. This wasn't a feature story, though it was written in a feature style -- it's an Op/Ed Column. I have an old newspaper-worker's bias against the confusion between "articles," which contain news no matter what their style is and which are edited by the news staff, and "columns," which are not representative of the newspaper's take on anything and fall under the jurisdiction of the editorial page editor and staff. If someone wrote this piece as a feature story, I'd be unhappy with it for many of the same reasons, but in assigning blame I'd go much broader than simply the reporter -- I'd go back to whomever sent that person on an assignment, and wonder why they hadn't gone for the story a year ago.
You're certainly right that my own political interests and Maureen Dowd's probably don't align perfectly. I don't think that was my motivation for writing about this -- it seems more centered on the fact that I think she's wasting her talents -- but I'll keep it in mind that it may come off this way, and that there may be truth to it. Always good to keep on top of our biases.
I don't mind the criticism -- I invite it every time I hit publish. I'm not sure I qualify for obsessed, however, until I start doing this two or three times a week. If anyone who takes the time to comment on the many ways she thinks another writer is wrong is obsessed...
The fallacy in this whole content outsourcing fantasy is this : Just because Indian Berkeley grads know the rules of punctuation and composition does not mean that they have or will ever have a grasp of local issues. Even less likely is that they will really comprehend anything so subtly complex as humor -- even Dowd is losing her grasp of it.
It's said that an infinite number of monkeys will eventually come up with the complete works of Shakespeare -- I say that's a lot of bananas.
And as for Z's copy editor BS, please be advised that NONE of the local papers around here even have a copy editor -- laid is played as they say. Given that, I can't wait to see what the local news reads like when somebody in Mysore, India. tries to explain about rattlesnakes biting the ass of the preacher at the local Hardshell Baptist Church -- can I get an Amen, Brothers and Sisters?
Now it's an empty office building. That was probably the plan all along!
1. Maureen Dowd's item was a feature article
2. She has shaped her journalistic career around satire and hyperbole
3. Neither she,nor any other journalist that I know of, can make my bells ring with every article she writes
4. I personally have been offended by some of her "wit" but we still have the First Ammendment (not withstanding W's efforts)
Finally, the timing of the attack was unfortunate- it might have been funny before the Mumbai disaster but reading it today...
MTK, Americain, stephanie -- thanks for the comment!
Ned, I'm definitely not appealing for the revocation of anyone's free speech rights.
And she is not.
Thanks for a Great piece of journalism!
She can afford office boys who bake. Shows you that isn't such a hot thing after all.