The news business is probably holding “a one-way ticket to Bangalore.”

My conclusion from observing over the years is that companies with failed business models go offshore to die. Not all businesses that go off-shore die, but the ones that have business models that require close interaction with their suppliers and customers, that require quick reaction, or that require unique (domain) knowledge won't be successful with a move off-shore. The businesses that survive, even thrive, off-shore are ones that are or can become commodity suppliers (e.g. low bandwidth is sufficient for control and they can tolerate high latency on their product).

Sometimes the business model can be changed to adapt but a business is too ossified to adapt. Sometimes the whole business is no longer viable and the end is inevitable. Either way, historically, trying to maintain a failed business model simply by cutting labor costs fails.

Local news is not something you can off-shore successfully. It requires high bandwidth, local knowledge, and low latency. From the article: "Macpherson admits you can lose something in the translation — the Pasadena City Council Webcast that the Indian reporters now watch once missed two African-American lawmakers walking out in protest — but says the question is, how significant is it?" Ummm... like, everything?

Most news outlets are just mills for regurgitating press releases wired over AP and Reuters. There's little actual reporting going on. It's much cheaper to run a paper this way -- fewer people working on the content itself allows you to print lots of paper with ads on it. Much of it is automated.

It's not like this is either some conspiracy or something unique to news. It's cheaper to run a restaurant by getting more of your stuff from Sysco. It's cheaper to build car lineups by basing more of them off of the same model and rebranding them. It's cheaper to print papers with ad space on them by automating the news portions as much as possible.

There's little reporting or fact checking going on. Only a few of the better papers aren't just regurgitation machines at this point, and even then, you're less likely to find hard-line reporting than years ago.

The rate of social change in America is so slow that even if you don't really understand what's going on, you aren't going to miss all that much. It's not like there exists this layer of dynamism, intellectually honest debate, and emotional nuance that we're suddenly going to start missing out on. If newspaper writing is formulaic then that's not a flaw in the writing, it's just an accurate reflection of American politics, life, and culture.

And has. A few will pay (to produce or to consume) better content. Some will lament.

Some vendors and some consumers will have better content and will find (some?) readers will pay. Most readers will be entertained by whatever manufactured news or whatever minimally-engineered product is presented. Those that are not sufficiently entertained can and will look elsewhere.

Having been subjected to watching the local "news" (and once you remove the shiny production sets and the perfect hair and computer graphics and event-specific theme music) and various of the mass-market low-cost products, there's "no there there." For me.

This is a fundamental feature of modern business; a business is led to monitor and to maintain or reduce expenses and overhead (long-experienced employees are expensive, long-term research is expensive) to stay competitive; it's effectively a slow race to the bottom. To how little news you can have (or software engineering skills, or new pharmaceuticals, or whatever the product...) to fill the allotted product slots and to meet your cost and revenue goals.

The world has chosen; both the producers and the consumers.

But around the edges of Big Pharma or Big Media? That's where all this consolidation and this business process optimization gets very interesting. Where you get bloggers that post (good) news. Where you get Dr Horrible's Sing-Along Blog, games, tools, or other productions. Where you get hundreds or thousands of musicians offering up music you'd never hear in mass-market media. Where you find the folks that'll buy. Same thing Big Pharma or Big Media are looking for. Except you don't have the overhead.

I read a lot and 99% is not what you describe.

Also, the difference between drugs and well-researched news stories is their perceived value. People perceive drugs to be of a high price and don't mind paying that price--especially when the drug has a patent. The same is not true for well-researched news stories: while there may be a niche customer segment that will pay for it, most folks that read news do not perceive the well-researched news stories to be of significant monetary value. The choice for newspapers then is to keep sinking money on expensive researched studies or adjust to a model which better addresses the needs of their customers, even if it means letting go folks.

Now I like reading good news sources as much as the other person (the Britannica I will probably never read again unless a search takes me there), but the way to consume and find information has fundamentally changed for a large portion of the populace. Not sure if it necessarily means that news necessarily gets outsourced, but definitely gets fragmented and distributed. The key for news organizations (as opposed to a newspaper which is a medium) is to figure out how to stay relevant in that environment.

Now I like reading good news sources as much as the other person (the Britannica I will probably never read again unless a search takes me there), but the way to consume and find information has fundamentally changed for a large portion of the populace. Not sure if it necessarily means that news necessarily gets outsourced, but definitely gets fragmented and distributed. The key for news organizations (as opposed to a newspaper which is a medium) is to figure out how to stay relevant in that environment.

W.R.T. hard core investigative journalism, I think the traditional pubs still win. The Cleveland Plain Dealer just spent the past year or so investigating Cuyahoga County (within which lies Cleveland) government corruption. As a somewhat direct result, a ballot initiative passed to significantly change the form of county government. I bet the paper invested well over $1M in reporting. Did it pay off? No clue, but I sure hope so.