Journalist Offshoring With Obligation

By: David Schlesinger Change is hard. Change is hardest on those caught by surprise. Change is hardest on those who have difficulty changing too. But change is natural; change is not new, change is important.

The current debate about offshoring is dangerously hot. But the debate about work going to India, China and Mexico is actually no different from the debate once held about submarine work leaving my hometown of New London, Conn., or shoe work leaving Massachusetts or textile work leaving North Carolina.

Work gets done where it can be done most effectively and efficiently. That ultimately helps the New Londons, New Bedfords and New Yorks of this world even more than it helps the Bangalores and Shenzhens. It helps because it frees up people and capital to do different, more sophisticated work, and it helps because it gives an opportunity to produce the end product more cheaply, benefiting customers even as it helps the corporation.

Work should be done where it's done best. Reporters in New York, Chicago and Los Angeles are best placed to visit companies, go to analyst presentations and interview corporation executives, and that's why we will always have large, sophisticated bureaus there and elsewhere. New York is not the best place to look at information flowing across a computer screen, information which can flow as quickly to Bangalore as to mid-town Manhattan.

In Reuters' case, we're being very open about our plans to cut our total number of employees by 2,000 by the end of next year. That's a question of survival, driven by fundamental, structural changes to our business.

It's certainly difficult for individuals to think about "their" work going away, being done thousands of miles away by someone earning thousands of dollars less per year. But it's time to think about the opportunity as well as the pain, just as it's time to think about the obligations of offshoring as well as the opportunities.

Working globally is nothing new for a company like Reuters, which has been global for more than 150 years. We've had operations in India and Thailand and China for years; the only thing that's different now is the kind of work done in those places.

On the journalism side of the business, where I'm in charge of global operations, our bureau in India has a long and distinguished history of reporting the news -- from the time we had a world beat on the assassination of Mahatma Gandhi to the present. The only thing that's different about what we're doing now -- hiring Indian journalists in Bangalore to do tasks like report on some U.S. companies, collect diary information and provide reference services to our bureaus worldwide -- is that we're taking advantage of the tremendous advances in global communications and computer technology to look at news as the global commodity it really is.

While some commoditized journalism may move offshore, the demands for the value-added journalism in New York and elsewhere will end up stronger and tougher than ever. That ends up being good for our clients, for our company and for our journalists themselves.

We can't close our eyes to the way the financial services and media sectors are changing. We can't -- and won't -- abandon our commitment to high-quality, unbiased news. We can't ignore our clients' demand for broader coverage any more than we can ignore the imperatives of our own budget strictures.

The only way to balance both sides of the equation is to come up with new answers to the old questions. Every person, just as every corporation, must tend to his or her own economic destiny, just as our parents and grandparents in the mills, shoe shops and factories did. That means continually upgrading skills and staying alert to emerging opportunities.

Offshoring is not a happy topic. No one likes thinking their job could be done elsewhere, perhaps even better. When the debate is on the individual level, it can't help getting personal, sensitive, hurtful and difficult.

But we owe it to our future to take the debate to the next level. The question shouldn't be "Why?" It should be "What can I do now that I don't have to do the work that's gone abroad?" and it must be "What can you, my company, do to help me make a fresh start?"

If we ask those questions, and come up with intelligent answers, all of our lives will, in fact, be better.