This story was written in Calcutta: even articles about outsourcing are being outsourced

Chief Executive, The, May, 2004 by Joe Queenan

The outsourcing of American jobs has quickly emerged as one of the major issues of the presidential campaign. These days, it's impossible to open a newspaper or turn on the news without being assaulted by a horde of self-aggrandizing politicians bloviating about the issue. Literally thousands of articles have treated the subject in exhaustive and, in most cases, tedious detail, reminding readers that innumerable programmers, accountants, diagnostic technicians and order fulfillment clerks have seen their jobs shipped overseas--usually to India--for good.

But this is just the tip of the iceberg. What many Americans do not realize is that most of those very same newspaper stories about outsourcing are now being written by low-paid journalists in the Asian subcontinent.

"Nobody knows more about outsourcing than Indian journalists, because they've had to write so many stories about other jobs that were outsourced," says Vijay Shankar, a Bombay-based journalist who works full time writing about outsourcing for American newspapers. "So it was only natural for Indian journalists to take all the outsourcing stories away from American journalists, not only because we will work for one-sixth the rate Americans demand but because American journalists are tired of writing about it."

Shankar's view is confirmed by Bill Kupchack, media coordinator for the American Society of Professional and Semi-Professional Journalists. "No one working for an American newspaper wants to write about outsourcing any more," he explains. "It's boring, repetitive and no one really understands the economic issues involved. Most American journalists secretly suspect that, in the long term, outsourcing is a good thing for the economy. It frees up talented people to work on important projects rather than slaving away at drone work, but nobody dares say that aloud in an election year. So American journalists are more than happy to see these jobs shipped overseas."

Just about everyone involved agrees that Indian journalists have done a bang-up job reporting on the outsourcing problem. With the exception of a few phrases like 'stuck on a sticky wicket' and 'hit' em for six' that occasionally creep into their copy, they have produced news stories about outsourcing that are every bit as good as the work of their American counterparts. Indeed, their work has been of such consistently high quality that many other reading materials are now being outsourced.

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"Most of the advertising copy on the back of organic cereal boxes has now been outsourced to India," Shankar adds. "Increasingly, computer manuals, disclaimers on the reverse side of theater tickets and the uplifting messages inside Christmas cards are being written somewhere in Asia. Realistically, it's only a matter of time before the President of the United States starts outsourcing his State of the Union address to Indians. And why not? Indians speak better English than Bush's speechwriters. And the same goes for Kerry."

Kupchack notes that raunchy male magazines are increasingly having their articles written in foreign countries because, as he phrases it, "any idiot could write that stuff, so why pay that idiot a huge salary when you can get it done on the cheap by someone from another country who is actually intelligent?" Car maintenance manuals, garment cleaning guidelines and the instructions accompanying many generic prescription drugs are also being outsourced abroad, as no one ever reads these labyrinthine materials in the first place. Mutual fund prospectuses, diet books and cell phone instructional manuals are sure to follow.

The big question is whether mainstream journalism and editorial-page materials will one day be outsourced to foreign nations. Shankar says it's only a matter of time. "American journalists only want to write about Paris Hilton, Botox, Michael Jackson, Martha Stewart, what made the dinosaurs disappear and whether liposuction works," he explains. "This is what they are good at, and it is unlikely that those types of stories could be successfully written by journalists working in a foreign country. But anyone with a high school diploma can write about recent developments at the Commerce Department or the fallout from the latest report by the Bureau of Labor Statistics."

That's not all. "Mark my words: Jay Leno's opening monologue will one day be written by a team of Indian stand-up comics," Shankar prophesies. "Why pay American ghostwriters $150,000 a year to write a bunch of corny jokes when you can get the same jokes for a tenth of the price abroad? Indians have been writing corny jokes since before Columbus landed."