Outsourcing

For this week’s blog entry I decided to Google “copy editing” and see what I could find. I ended up finding an article in “Business Week” from July 8, 2008 called “Copyediting? Ship the Work Out to India.”

It was actually a really interesting article, mostly about a company called Mindworks. This is a company that is located in India and has been around for four years. Mindworks is a company that does outsourcing for newspapers and other publications in the U.S. and Europe. However, they have only been editing for American papers for this past year. The article states that they do work that journalists and copyeditors usually do.

I did not know until relatively recently that some papers outsourced their copyediting and other jobs to other countries. And I am not sure how I feel about this.

First of all, sending these jobs to other countries is creating less jobs here for American citizens to have. In addition, people in other countries have other ways to talking and probably ways to edit things. Therefore, I feel that when editing is done in another country, they might fix or change something in a way that we would not read over here. Even though they would have certain rules and learn how we edit and read here, I feel that there are some things that could still potentially be overlooked.

However, the article states that “Mindworks claims that it helps publications cut costs 35% to 40%.” So I suppose that if this is true then there are some positives to outsourcing copy editing. Because since the newspaper industry continues to struggle every year with work being moved to the internet and just having high costs of being in business saving money wherever they can is beneficial.

However, as I continued to read the article, I came across the part about how the people in India go about copyediting. And they say that they never actually contact the reporter. I just think this is a little bit ridiculous. I feel that if the copyeditor needs clarifying or needs to discuss something about the story then the first person they should talk to is the person who actually wrote the story. However, Mindworks states that they do not. I feel that if the person editing doesn’t talk to the reporter when they need clarification then they could end up changing the story to mean something else. I think that this system could just lead to potential problems and some libel issues.

After reading and re-reading this article I still do not know where I stand on the issue of outsourcing journalism and copyediting. I agree that there are both positives and negatives to this. So I guess that only time will show if this is actually good or bad based on what happens while outsourcing.