Well, now I can officially say I’ve heard everything when it comes to saving money in the journalism biz:
Pasadena news site outsources local coverage to India
The job posting was a head-scratcher: “We seek a newspaper journalist based in India to report on the city government and political scene of Pasadena, California, USA.”
A reporter half a world away covering local street-light contracts and sewer repairs? A reporter who has never gotten closer to Pasadena than the telecast of the Rose Bowl parade?
Outsourcing first claimed manufacturing jobs, then hit services such as technical support, airline reservations and tax preparation. Now comes the next frontier: local journalism.
James Macpherson, editor and publisher of the two-year-old Web site pasadenanow.com, acknowledged it sounds strange to have journalists in India cover news in this wealthy city just outside Los Angeles.
But he said it can be done from afar now that weekly Pasadena City Council meetings can be watched over the Internet. And he said the idea makes business sense because of India’s lower labor costs.
“I think it could be a significant way to increase the quality of journalism on the local level without the expense that is a major problem for local publications,” said the 51-year-old Pasadena native. “Whether you’re at a desk in Pasadena or a desk in Mumbai, you’re still just a phone call or e-mail away from the interview.”
The first articles, some of which will carry bylines, are slated to appear Friday.
OK, I hear him on the whole Webcasting thing, but from personal experience, I have to say there’s no substitute for being able to clarify things after a meeting with residents, elected officials and staff. And, of course, residents coming in to vent at meetings are an invaluable source of story leads and you miss out on those entirely if you don’t go to meetings, even if you watch the Webcast of people who will never have your business card pressed into their hands.
Still, I bet this idea spreads.
So, I was innocently listening to Marketplace on my iPod when I heard Deron Lovaas speaking on the air, although Marketplace spelled his name wrong in the transcript. Despite the spelling issue, I figured it was him: How many people could there be with that name?
And, indeed, Deron works for the National Resources Defense Council:
DERON LOVAAS is vehicles campaign director and deputy director of the smart growth and transportation program. He currently directs NRDC’s oil security issue campaign and served as chief lobbyist on the federal transportation bill. A graduate of the University of Virginia, Deron coordinated Sierra Club’s Challenge to Sprawl campaign and managed Zero Population Growth’s sprawl educational outreach program. He also worked on transportation and air-quality planning at Maryland’s Department of the Environment.
See, I might be a journalist, but he’s a lobbyist.
He’s not the only one who’s making waves in Washington. Our mutual friend and classmate Jessica Arons is Director of the Women’s Health and Rights Program at the Center for American Progress (a leftie think tank that’s a counterpart to the Cato Institute). I haven’t caught her on the radio, but I’m sure it’s just a matter of time.
Given how many fellow South Lakes graduates stayed in the Washington area, I suppose the real surprise is that more of them haven’t yet shown up in visible positions in the world of politics and policy.
So much for the anti-blogging order being misunderstood: Now the Pentagon is cutting access to YouTube, MySpace and other sites entirely:
Lt. Daniel Zimmerman, an infantry platoon leader in Iraq, puts a blog on the Internet every now and then “to basically keep my friends and family up to date” back home.
It just got tougher to do that for Zimmerman and a lot of other U.S. soldiers. No more using the military’s computer system to socialize and trade videos on MySpace, YouTube and more than a dozen others Web sites, the Pentagon says.
Citing security concerns and technological limits, the Pentagon has cut off access to those sites for personnel using the Defense Department’s computer network. The change limits use of the popular outlets for service members on the front lines, who regularly post videos and journals.
Memos about the change went out in February, and it took effect last week. It does not affect the Internet cafes that soldiers in Iraq use that are not connected to the Defense Department’s network. The cafe sites are run by a private vendor, FUBI (For US By Iraqis).
Also, the Pentagon said that many of the military computers on the front lines in Iraq that are on the department’s network had previously blocked the YouTube and MySpace sites.
The ban also does not affect other sites, such as Yahoo, and does not prevent soldiers from sending messages and photos to their families by e-mail.
Among the sites covered by the ban are the video-sharing sites YouTube, Metacafe, IFilm, StupidVideos and FileCabi; social networking sites MySpace, BlackPlanet and Hi5; music sites Pandora, MTV, 1.fm and live365, and the photo-sharing site Photobucket.
We had the baby shower this weekend at Ellis Truss and there were cousins and neighbors and Scattegories and bingo and lots and lots and lots of food. We now seem to be pretty much set for newborn diapers and got a Diaper Genie (I wish I could train the cats to use it), and a crib set and an amazing handmade pirate quilt (the nursery is going to be ocean/pirate themed) and lots more besides.
Peter and Sharon from the Star gave us a bunch of stuff from our Amazon registry and some other books as well, and a very fat stuffed cat who looks more than a little like Hanna.
 Phyllis Schlafly, whom many will be surprised to learn is still alive, has a theory about what happened at Virginia Tech: All that evil learning made Seung-Hui Cho do it.
Without having access to Cho’s transcript, she goes through the godless, secular Tech English department course list — which, I can say from personal experience, has biblical stuff all over it (it’s where I first read Lord Byron’s “Cain,” as well as getting involved in endless discussions of “Paradise Lost” and various types of angels and numerous saints) — and finds the smoking gun is a book. A lot of books, in fact.
Cho was an English Department major and senior. As a frequent lecturer on college campuses, I have discovered that the English Departments are often the weirdest and/or the most leftwing.
A look at the websites of Virginia Tech’s English Department and of its professors reveals their mindset. We don’t yet know which courses Cho took, but it could have been any of these.
Did he take Professor Bernice L. Hausman’s English 5454 called “Studies in Theory: Representing Female Bodies”? The titles of the assigned readings include “Black Bodies, White Bodies: Toward an Iconography of Female Sexuality in Late Nineteenth-Century Art, Medicine, and Literature,” “The Comparative Anatomy of Hottentot Women in Europe, 1815-1817,” “Selling Hot Pussy: Representations of Black Female Sexuality in the Cultural Marketplace,” “The Anthropometry of Barbie: Unsettling Ideals of the Feminine Body in Popular Culture,” and “Foucault, Femininity, and the Modernization of Patriarchal Power.”
One of the assignments in this course (worth 10 percent of the total grade) is to “choose one day in which they dress and comport themselves in a manner either more masculine or more feminine than they would normally.”
Is this really a course taught by the English Department? It sounds like just the thing to confuse an already mixed-up kid.
Hausman uses “feminist pedagogy” theory, believing that sex and gender are merely “rhetorical constructs” resulting from cultural experiences, and that “students are more responsible for the creation of knowledge.” She lists her areas of expertise as “sexed embodiment, feminist and gender theory, and cultural studies of medicine.”
Other titles authored by Professor Hausman include “Changing Sex: Transsexualism, Technology, and the Idea of Gender,” “Do Boys Have to Be Boys?,” and “Virtual Sex, Real Gender: Body and Identity in Transgender Discourse.”
Perhaps Cho took Professor Bernice Hausman’s English 3354 on “Fundamentals” for which the syllabus promises an understanding of “deconstruction” (a favorite word in English departments).
Did Cho get evil egotistical notions from Professor Shoshana Milgram Knapp’s senior seminar called “The Self-Justifying Criminal in Literature”? Indeed, that could serve as his own self-portrait.
Did Cho take Professor J.D. Stahl’s senior seminar, English 4784, on “The City in Literature”? The assigned reading starts with a book about an urban prostitute who finally kills herself and a book about a violent man who kills his girlfriend.
Virginia Tech’s Distinguished Professor of English, Nikki Giovanni, has built a reputation as a “renowned poet,” even though many of her so-called poems feature violent themes and contain words that are not acceptable in civil discourse. She specializes in diversity, post-modernism, feminism, and multiculturalism.
Giovanni appeared last year at a public celebration to open Cincinnati’s new Fountain Square. She used the occasion to call Ken Blackwell, then the Republican candidate for Ohio Governor, an “S.O.B.”, and when challenged, simply repeated the slur. (Note: Nobody suggested giving her the Don Imus punishment.)
Did Cho take a course from Professor Paul Heilker, author of another peculiar piece called “Textual Androgyny, the Rhetoric of the Essay, and the Politics of Identity in Composition (or The Struggle to Be a Girly-Man in a World of Gladiator Pumpitude)”?
Or maybe Cho preferred the undiluted Marxism espoused by English instructor Allen Brizee, who wrote: “Everyday, the capitalist system exploits millions of people. … Our role in the capitalist system makes us guilty of oppression!”
Schlafly, of course, ignores even more shocking courses like Introduction to American Literature and Late 19th Century English Literature and Introduction to Creative Writing, all of which are also terribly profane and, you know, more likely to be taken by any given student than a one-semester seminar that’s done mostly to keep professors happy. I had to take a full semester of Jane Austen and Lord Byron as my senior seminar (“Mythology in the Modern Day” was full, to no one’s surprise).
(Source: Wired.)
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