I am somewhat reluctant to mention Maureen Dowd's column in the New York Times for fear it might put a further idea about my journalistic future in to the head of that cost cutting editor of mine at Crikey but here goes. Ms Dowd has just discovered this newspaper - the Pasadena Now - which prompted her to write that the newspaper business was probably holding “a one-way ticket to Bangalore.”
Pasadena Now, you see, is written by six people out of various parts of India who earn $US7.50 per 1000 words to tell the people what is going on in their Californian community. The proprietor used to employ six journalists actually in Pasadena who were paid $600 to $800 a week each.
For a journalist this is a real horror story. While the newspaper business might be going bad as people turn to the internet, we scribes had not imagined that jobs would also be threatened by something called globalisation. We should be smug and complacent on that score no more as Pasadena Now shows. The product is as good as many comparable small town papers even if its authors have never been there.
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