End of World Looming? India Says "Perhaps"

LUBBOCK (not India), Texas -- A disturbing column in the New York Times forwarded to me from doctoral student Wendy Maxian makes me think that the next aluminum foil-headed prognosticator might be right.

As former friends continue to face layoffs in journalism, I cannot help but cringe over local news being staffed from a continent away.

I checked in with one of his workers in Mysore City in southern India, 40-year-old G. Sreejayanthi, who puts together Pasadena events listings. She said she had a full-time job in India and didn’t think of herself as a journalist. “I try to do my best, which need not necessarily be correct always,” she wrote back. “Regarding Rose Bowl, my first thought was it was related to some food event but then found that is related to Sports field.”

It was once written that all politics are local. I never imagined that the corollary would be that no journalism is local.

The only way this works is if newspapers (whatever form they will take) are some sort of cheap aggregators, and all genuinely local information comes from blogs.

In which case, even a hack coder such as myself can probably write a better program to aggregate news -- and do so more cheaply than $7.50 per thousand words.

Sigh.