It Was Bound to Happen

First you become spineless, then you become irrelevant - then they find someone who'll do your job on the cheap.

Who am I referring to? Why the scribes who write for our media. They're about to become the latest victims of outsourcing and, alarming as that is, they deserve it. For years our journalists have knelt reverently at the feet of globalization and the corporate transformation of our society. They had it coming.

Take a look at this from the International Herald Tribune:

PARIS: The rush of job recruiting ads on MonsterIndia.com tells the story of the latest class of workers to watch their trade start migrating to another continent.

"'Urgent requirement for business writers,' reads one ad looking for journalists to locate in Mumbai. 'Should be willing to work in night shifts (UK shift.)'

"Another casts for English-speaking journalists in Bangalore with "experience in editing and writing for US/International Media.'

Remote-control journalism is the scornful term that unions use for the shift of newspaper jobs to low-cost countries like India or Singapore with fiber-optic connections transmitting information all around the world.

"More than two years ago, Reuters, the financial news service, opened a new center in Bangalore. The 340 employees, including an editorial team of 13 local journalists, was deployed to write about corporate earnings and broker research on U.S. companies. Since then, the Reuters staff at the center has grown to about 1,600, with 100 journalists working on U.S. stories.

"The company has also moved photo editing work from Canada and Washington, D.C., to Singapore.

"More expansion is planned in India, according to David Schlesinger, Reuters global managing editor, who said costs were significantly lower in India, although the competition to recruit financial journalists there was increasing."

There never was much job security in journalism but there's less now and even less to come.