A Bad Idea

May 12 - I began my career at a tiny, tiny, weekly newspaper. My salary, such as it was, kept me just above the poverty line, and that's a rough way to start a career. Just about everybody I started with is doing something else now, something that actually paid a living wage.

The running joke in the newsroom was that any of us could go out and get a job at McDonald's and make more money. Talk about your McJobs. Our publisher was so cheap, one year I swear to God she quite literally gave each of us a little log cabin-shaped tin of maple syrup as a Christmas bonus. One year, our annual raise was 25 cents an hour.

I'm telling you, community journalism is not a path paved with gold.

But that little syrup and quarter raise count as positive corporate largesse compared to the story of James Macpherson, who runs Pasadena Now, a website that covers Pasadena, Calif. Macpherson plans to hire two Indian reporters to cover town hall meetings, city government, the planning board, that kind of thing.

Two Indian reporters who work in Mumbai, India, mind you.

Macpherson figures he can save some money outsourcing the job of reporting to India. He runs the website with his wife and an intern, according to an AP story on what is one of the oddest journalism experiments in recent memory.

He's paying the two about $20,000. No word on Christmas bonuses. The pair were supposed to start this week, according to the AP story. I browsed the website, but couldn't find any bylined stories, so it's hard to tell if they're working yet. Of course, the fact that I couldn't tell in some cases where the story was being written from, well, that's actually a little spooky.

Larry Wilson of the Pasadena-Star News called it nutty, according to an LA Times story. And nutty is what it is. The city council webcasts its meetings, so it's physically possible for a person in Mumbai to watch the proceedings, write about it, send it electronically to Macpherson in California and have him edit and publish it.

Maybe the people of Pasadena won't notice, or care. I went to those town hall meetings, and most of them were boring. But you heard things, in the halls, before and after the meeting. You talked to council members, to residents. You walked around town, met people at the deli who had a bit of news to pass along. You developed relationaships with people. That's how you learned things. That's how you broke stories.

You can't do that from Mumbai.

- Paul Vigna