Will Glide Outsource Hidden Track to India?

With more and more jobs from an ever-growing number of industries being outsourced to India – and other countries where the labor is cheap and the girls are pretty –  one day in the future you might point your browser towards our slice of the web to find a new, cheaper set of contributors in place.

It’s not such a farfetched scenario. Two years ago a California-based newspaper set up a web cam at City Hall in Pasadena and hired two writers based in India to cover the City Council and this week the editors of the New Haven Advocate hired Indian freelance journalists to write the paper. Among the assignments given to the outsourced writers was a profile of the best Grateful Dead tribute band on any continent, the Dark Star Orchestra.

Writer Vijayalaxmi Hegde interviewed DSO drummer Dino English, researched the band’s history and wound up putting together a pretty good feature. We asked longtime DSO fan The_Rick to tell us what he thought about Vijayalaxmi’s article and he said “it’s like every other Dark Star article I have ever read.” As much as we hate to say it, we agree. Luckily for American journalists the staff of the Advocate faced major challenges locating and hiring the Indian writers and they didn’t even wind up saving much money. So for now it appears my job is safe, but don’t be surprised if one day you’re getting your Phish news from a writer in Bangalore instead of Burlington.