Outsourcing journalism

While spending last summer in Spain, I missed the uproar over reporting jobs being outsourced to India, as reported by the LA Times in June 2007.

Ben Frumin of the Columbia Journalism Review recently reported that Express KCS, a back-office Indian company doing much of this outsourcing, has become more successful – and ambitious – since the story first broke:

Express KCS doesn’t propose to report or write stories, but it does offer copy editing (or “subbing,” as it’s known in India), page layout, and the writing of headlines and captions. By year’s end, Husain hopes that 10 to 15 percent of Express KCS’s business will come from outsourced editorial work. He said the company is discussing such work with more than one mainstream U.S. daily, though he wouldn’t name them.