After IT companies, banking and finance, call centres, education, medical transcription and legal sectors, now the US looks for outsourcing editing jobs to India and some other developing countries.
"Sure, there have been some basic business reporting and data-entry jobs moving to India, says Sreenath Srinivasan, a professor of Mass Communication in Columbia University in an e-mail interview.
Media watchers say Bangalore has already attracted attention of the world media. Reuters opened a data and news gathering operation in Bangalore in 2004 as part of a trial run.
The agency's Bangalore operation has more than 1,000 employees, including about 100 reporters and editors, who churn out news briefs, analyst ratings changes, earnings tables, economic polling data and other data products for the company's subscribers. The trend is only gaining momentum.
Globally, outsourcing of content and other services in the publishing industry is pegged at $2.5 billion. In India, outsourced publishing service business is doing a turnover of Rs1000 crore (Rs 10 billion) annually.
Recent industry analyses show that the newspaper industry in the developed world is ready to outsource its non-core and core functions to destinations such as India to achieve cost cutting.
A recent decision by the Boston Globe, owned by the New York Times, to outsource editorial jobs to India has already triggered agitation by the unions there who are up in arms.
Although newspapers have started outsourcing of editorial work to Indian journalists, the change is not going to be smooth for the American readers, says Sunil Saxena, an online journalist and author of book Headline Writing.
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