Dateline: Pasadena, Calif. (or is that Mumbai, India?)

When fears arose a few years ago that journalism jobs would start to be outsourced to India, I thought it was the craziest thing I had ever heard. How could a guy in Mumbai report on the minutia of local politics in the United States? But, as seemingly crazy things tend to do, it became a reality, and it doesn't look like it's going to let up any time soon.

At the end of 2005 Reuters had already set up a 1,000+ media workforce in Bangalore, India that reports on Wall Street. Information about Wall Street aside -- after all, stock quotes can be analyzed as quickly on the other side of the globe thanks to our friend, technology -- I've still been skeptical that the trend would worm its way into local journalism.

But in a recent post in Information Week, blogger Richard Martin writes about PasadenaNow.com, which recently outsourced its city council reporting beat to two journalists in India.

Hatched by Web site publisher James MacPherson, who has the temerity to call local reporting "the routine stuff" that can be done from 9,000 miles away, this scheme has already attracted a legion of scoffers, most of them U.S.-based journalists, naturally. Speaking to The Associated Press, USC journalism professor Bryce Nelson called it "a truly sad picture of what American journalism could become."

So why is this happening? I think there are two reasons.

The first is obvious, it's the reason for outsourcing in all industries: cheap labor. The Indian journalists' combined salary is less than $20,000 a year -- a real coup for a local news organization that is probably like most local news organizations in the U.S. Local news organizations as I know them have one major goal: to constantly increase their already high profit margins (most U.S. newspapers make rake in a 20 to 30 percent profit margin as it is). One starting reporter at a small community newspaper makes all of $20,000 a year in more markets than most people would believe. Of course, as reporters gain experience, move onto bigger papers, or gain seniority, their salary increases some what. Either way, two reporters for the price of one starting reporter most likely has accountants in the media industry salivating. And with recent industry trends -- falling circulation, falling ad sales, reader traffic moving to the web, which most news companies have yet to find a way to make profitable -- outsourcing reporters must seem like a great way to keep profit margins high.

The second reason is less, well, nice: U.S. journalists are getting lazy. I know, I've been there, and I'm just as guilty as the next person of lazy reporting. We reporters make excuses for our lazy reporting -- being overworked, a small staff, no overtime budget. These reasons are valid, and I know writing ten or more stories a week will make anyone want to dash a few stories off without proofreading or confirming facts. But when the most local of local reporting jobs, the bread-and-butter of beat reporting, gets outsourced to India, it should be a wake up call. Journalists should be taking a second look at their own work. If we were producing unbeatable, compelling stories, our work couldn't be outsourced.

Happy Labor Day!

Reuters reported yesterday that 0.1 percent of children in Shanghai -- or one in 1,000 surveyed -- want to grow up to be "common workers." The story notes that while being a common worker used to be the ideal of the communist movement, values in China have changed since Deng Xiaoping proclaimed that "to be rich is glorious."

Newly rich Chinese are expected to spend the holiday, a time to celebrate the international labor movement, opening their wallets in far-flung destinations, reaping the rewards of higher paying jobs in the professions and financial sector.

My question is: Who is that one kid in 1,000 who wants to be a common laborer? And by "common laborer" I mean the guys using pick axes to dig a hole to the sewer line in my neighborhood, the mine workers who disappear in coal mine collapses on a regular basis, the construction workers climbing up scaffolding 15 stories high without ropes, sometimes without shoes.

There's absolutely no sense in wanting to be a common worker in China. People do it out of necessity, not desire. I can't even imagine the children of common workers wanting to grow up to be common workers.

So that one child, does he really want to be a common worker? I imagine his parents are making him spend the holiday memorizing Marx while his friends are lounging on a beach in Hainan.

So you want a new mom?

Continuing its trek through absurdity, the China Daily reports that a teenage girl in Dalian has been paying a classmate's aunt to pose as her mother at school meetings. Why? Because her mom lacked fashion sense.

Although Pingping attends school regularly, Wang never attended any of the parents' meetings because her daughter never told her about them. It was only when Wang called the school did she realize she had missed many meetings. Bewildered, Wang asked her daughter about what was going on, but Pingping's answer astonished her. "You made me lose face," she replied. "I have been asking a classmate's aunt to take part in it for me, 50 yuan (US$6.4) each time."

Apparently being embarrassed by your parents when you're a teenager is universal. The story continues with a long, hilarious account of the ongoing mother-daughter troubles between Wang and Pingping, and attempts to place the "conflict" in some sort of social context:

The generation gap in China has become so dramatic that parents who fail to catch up with the rest of the society could be abandoned by their children.

That statement left me as bewildered as the mom with no fashion sense. Note to Chinese moms and dads: You better wake up and smell the Calvin Klein, otherwise you won't have an offspring to take care of you in your retirement years!

Torch ignites controversy

I can't help it -- that headline was irresistible. Now that I don't write stuff like that for a living, I have to do it somewhere, so please forgive me.

I enjoyed a brief flurry of stories about the Beijing Olympics torch last week. After Beijing announced that the torch relay would include a climb up Mt. Everest, there was a little commotion caused by some Free Tibet protesters at base camp. It would have been little more than a blip on the news radar if it weren't for the fact that the activists, all American, were arrested.

But I found the wrangling over Taipei's position in the torch relay much more interesting. In the ongoing struggle between the PRC and Taiwan to project opposite images of inclusion/independence, Taipei will be the last stop on the international route/first domestic stop on the torch relay, or that's the plan so far. Officials in Taipei are said to have refused to be part of the domestic leg of the torch relay, but agreed to be a part of it if the torch entered from another country and exited to Hong Kong. Apparently that was international enough for Taiwan to accept and domestic enough for Beijing to accept.

That is, until Tsai Chen-wei, the head of Taiwan's Olympic Committee, decided that even that was unacceptable.

"This route is a domestic route that constitutes an attempt to downgrade our sovereignty," Tsai said. Tsai's comments contradicted an April 13 statement by another Taiwanese Olympic official, who said the island could accept a spot on the torch route that involved Hong Kong.

As a side note, not surprisingly the Chinese press includes Taipei on all its maps of the domestic relay.

Now while I see the concerns on both sides, the torch route is nothing more than a public relations battle, of which I believe Beijing has already won. Taipei's back and forth -- yes we accept, no we don't -- isn't helping their image or their credibility. To an international audience, the argument over placement in a torch relay can seem silly and irrelevant.

The 2008 Olympics has the potential to be a PR coup not only for Beijing, but also for Taiwan, human rights activists, the "Free Tibet-ers," big business -- and any individual or organization that has a stake in China. I, personally, am interested to see how the spin plays itself out over the next year.

Much has been written on the Everest protest in the blogsphere. Here are a few posts worth reading:
* Protests at the Roof of the World, Bad History and a new P.R. strategy for the P.R.C. from Jottings from the Granite Studio.
* An amusing post that makes its point well: Free Advice for the Free Tibet Crowd from Mutant Palm
* And an account from one of the Mt. Everest protesters himself in The Columbian.

When life imitates textbook

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My view of the Great Wall on a trip to Badaling in March.

While I was reading a wonderful book called Spook: Science Tackles the Afterlife by Mary Roach (also the author of the equally fascinating Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers), I experienced what one scientist who studies the afterlife described to Roach as a "dazzle shot."

You see, this scientist, Gary Schwartz -- a psych professor at the University of Arizona and the founder of a lab that does research on mediums, including Alison DuBois, the inspiration for the American TV series, Medium -- has asked dead people a lot of questions. And since Gary Schwartz is not himself a medium, he uses mediums to ask relatively mundane questions about the afterlife. Do you eat? Can you see me when I'm in the shower? He's also conducted studies that asked people to rate a medium's accuracy in describing a loved one. They had four rating options: hit, miss, questionable, or "dazzle shot" -- in other words, so accurate it was spooky.

Although my experience with the "dazzle shot" did not involve dead people, or the afterlife or mediums for that matter, I still think "dazzle shot" is the perfect phrase to describe the accuracy with which my Chinese textbook portrayed my very own life one morning not so long ago.

As usual, at 7:40 a.m. I walked downstairs to the bike parking area in front of my building. I tried to unlock my bike, but couldn't. I stood there and scratched my head for a second. Wait. That's not my bike. It's silver like my bike, but not mine. I have a different basket. I stood there gaping at the five or six bikes locked up in front of me. I didn't want to believe my bike wasn't there, so I just kept staring. When I realized how incredibly late to class I was going to be if I didn't immediately head for the bus stop, I snapped out of it. I had just bought that bike two weeks before. I seethed on the bus on the way to class -- it was the second time this year I had had a bike stolen.

I arrived 20 minutes late to class, opened my textbook to the day's lesson and started reading the text with the class. Halfway through I realized that the character Da Shan (hopefully no relation to the Canadian Da Shan of CCTV9) was living my life. In the text he explains to his friend that he's been having a lot of bad luck lately.

Here's a rough translation of the part of the text that would have made me check "hit" on a Gary Schwartz medium survey:

Da Shan: Someone "rode away" on the bike I just bought, and until now he hasn't returned it.
Ai De Hua: And you're still waiting for him to return it? (Read this with a sarcastic tone and the whole text makes much more sense).

And here is where the "dazzle shot" comes in:

Da Shan: Last week I went to the Great Wall with a friend. When
we left the weather was so beautiful. As soon as we arrived, it started to rain really hard. We hadn't brought an umbrella and were completely soaked.

The week before that fateful lesson I had in fact been in Beijing and attempted to visit the Great Wall. And while I succeeded in making it to the well-touristed Badaling portion of the wall, I felt like the trip was such a failure that I should immediately start planning another trip to Beijing just so I could actually see the Great Wall the next time I visited. The weather, as it was on Da Shan's trip, was terrible, except even worse. It was snowing. And just like Da Shan, it wasn't snowing in Beijing when I left in the morning. It was a little overcast and grey, but I did not expect snow. The fog was so thick I could barely see 50 feet in front of me, so although I was standing on the Great Wall, I did not actually get to see the Great Wall.

All of this of course means nothing. My textbook is about as psychic as the gold fish that swim around in a tiny bowl in my living room. It just shows the obvious: that bikes are stolen often enough in China to warrant a chapter in my textbook (the same textbook that had a chapter devoted to diarrhea and food poisoning). But just for a moment, before the "dazzle shot" wore off, I imagined Gary Schwartz starting a new study that measured language textbooks' psychic ability.


Maybe I'll be lucky enough to see something more like this on my next trip to the Great Wall.

Spring in Nanjing

Flowering trees near Xuan Wu Hu.

Trouble in paradise

One of the best -- and most horrific -- travel experiences I've been lucky enough to have in China was a trip to Jiuzhaigou, a nature preserve in Sichuan Province. I'll never forget Jiuzhaigou's stunning beauty, crystal blue waters and stunning alpine scenery. I'll never forget being there with 20 thousand other people. I'll never forget the tour bus stops at stores that sold things like yak bone carvings, yak meat, costume jewelry, honey and tea.

And I'll never forget our tour guide, to whom someone mistakenly gave a microphone that she would use precisely as I was about to fall asleep. She woke us every morning before 6 a.m. She took us to restaurants that served only pickled vegetables and fatty pork. Oh, and did I mention the yak bone carving store?

We stopped at so many souvenir stores on the way to and from Jiuzhaigou that I lost count. After the first few I started to pretend I was asleep on the bus so I didn't have to go in and pretend to look at stuff I wasn't going to buy anyway. Little did I know that I was taking my life into my hands by ignoring my tour guide's only source of income.

According to a recent China Daily article about a disturbing attack by a tour guide -- who stabbed 20 people -- most tour guides in China aren't paid. Instead they earn a living by taking their clients to overpriced souvenir stands that will pay the guide a commission from every purchase made by a person in their tour group.

Xu Minchao, 25, was leading 40 tourists through Lijiang, a World Heritage-listed tourist destination in mountainous Yunnan province, on Sunday when he suddenly ran into a souvenir shop and demanded a knife, Xinhua said. "Not realizing the man was ready to kill, a girl in the shop gave him one and was stabbed immediately in the arm," Xinhua said.

The China Daily and the ever-entertaining Xinhua News Agency also mentioned the guide's "troubled" background.

Police were also investigating whether the attack was linked to an unhappy childhood, Xinhua said. "Xu ... broke down in tears when talking about his parent's divorce and how it overshadowed his childhood, according to local police," it said.

When I got back from Jiuzhaigou I had already made up my mind never to take another tour in China again. This story, not surprisingly, only cemented my bias against the Chinese tour group and its souvenir stops. I imagine that for the unlucky 20 tourists Lijiang, a nice little town also surrounded by stunning scenery, will forever be inextricably linked to a commission-hungry, knife-wielding tour guide who lost it over his childhood and, possibly, a yak bone carving.