With regards to outsourcing, there are certain places where it makes (economic) sense, and those are also the areas where talent concentration also makes a difference. If the world only needs one factory’s worth of widgets, it’s far more sensible to have one factory making widgets than 10 factories, each 90 per cent idle.

I don’t think that customer service and copy editing fits this niche. Part of it is simple language — as you point out, English skills in India, whether they are “better” or “worse” are absolutely different. That dialect doesn’t fit well in a North American paper.

But another part of it is the depth of local knowledge. The newspaper I’m employed at does a lot of coverage of nearby towns — all of them with idiosyncratic spellings. How is a person 10,000 km away supposed to know whether it should be “Virden” or “Verdin” … “Boissevain” or “Boisevain” … “Minnedosa” or “Minedossa”?

That type of accuracy — both grammatical and factual — is (or should be) absolutely critical for a newspaper. Get the name of a town wrong, and readers won’t trust anything else.

Don’t get me wrong: Their English is worlds better than my Hindi or Punjabi or any other language of mine apart from English. But I’m not endeavoring to be employed in an area where those language skills are required. It’s certainly possible that people in India who contract out their services as English copy editors are more skilled at that craft than my English coworkers are at COBOL (let alone English). But my experiences suggest that outsourcing leads to a reduction in quality proportional to the reduction in price.

The GOOD news, if there is any, is that this will free up these newspaper copy editors to get jobs that pay better, like working in the fast food industry.

(Note: Bachelor of Journalism, University of Missouri, 1988. 10 years in the newspaper industry, 10 years in the software industry.)