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Add one part satire to two parts sincerity. Sprinkle on a couple of rants. Stir liberally.
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Daily Blah FAQ
Who are you?
I'm the newly-appointed Future editor at Business 2.0 and the former San Francisco correspondent for Time Magazine.
Wow, so does this mean everything you write reflects Time Inc's opinion? Or do you perhaps have some sort of standard disclaimer to the effect that it doesn't?
Naturally, the opinions contained in this blog are not those of my employers. In fact, some opinions may be the polar opposite of my employers. Some may be the same, for all I know. Hey, it's not like I ask my employers their opinions about everything in the news, okay? Let's just say that if this were a Venn diagram with one circle marked "my opinions" and the other one marked "my employers' opinions", there would doubtless be some overlap. But neither I nor my employers are able to pinpoint exactly where that overlap is.
What is this Daily Blah thing?
An experiment for a column I wrote about blogging back in December 2001. All these years later, I haven't been able to kick the habit.
If it's called Daily Blah, how come you don't ... hey, wait, you're writing every day!
See? Told you I'd try harder.
Mister, you talk funny. Are you one of them furrners?
Why yes I am, as it happens. I was born, raised and educated in Great Britain. I've been living in the U.S. since 1996 and identify as British.
I say, old chap, you forgot the "u" in "colour."
No I didn't. I may identify as British, but I am also an American journalist writing for an American audience about mostly American issues. These two different sides of me are a constant source of tension. Nevertheless, Daily Blah will adhere to American English grammar and spelling.
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Daily Blah for... Tuesday, February 10, 2004
The Bangalore Syndrome
So there we were, in our safe little media world, writing stories about how everyone and his aunt was getting their jobs outsourced to India, how practically all call centers on the planet are now being run on the cheap in Bangalore, how Indian workers are being taught baseball scores and midwestern accents so you'll never know the difference, and we never thought for a moment it's going to happen to us. How could you outsource journalism? Aren't you always going to need troops on the ground, footsoldiers, shoe-leather correspondents?
Not according to Reuters. The wire service just announced it is outsourcing -- I can't believe I'm writing this -- outsourcing its financial reporting on 3,000 small to mid-sized American companies. Guess where? To Bangalore, India. Specifically, to six -- all of six! -- Bangalore reporters. Now apparently this set-up is pretty low-level stuff. The six reporters will be trawling financial records for the most basic of details; any actual interviewing will still be done in the U.S. But you know how these things go. Meet your thin end, Mr. Wedge.
Indeed, why stop there? Copy editors will be the next to go. Ship out a couple of dozen dictionaries to Bangalore, where they speak better English than most Americans, and you're done. Editors? Hell, they can mess up my prose for thirty cents an hour just as easily as they can for thirty dollars (just kidding, dear editors). Once most of the chain of command has moved over -- well, I'm sure any Administration and its plutocratic paymasters would be overjoyed to remove most reporters, writers and other assorted nattering nabobs as far away from the action as possible. They'll happily accomodate a few embedded journos, of course. As long as you keep them from talking to each other. Assign one pool reporter to each company and wait for Stockholm Syndrome to set in. That is, if anyone still calls it Stockholm Syndrome by then. I hear Swedish syndromes charge astronomical wages. Why not outsource?
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