An online news service in Pasadena, California, has worked out a new way to cover the deadly dull minutiae of city hall business — they have outsourced their city hall coverage to India.
PasadenaNow.com has hired two Indian reporters to observe all the city council’s proceedings (presumably over the web) and report on them daily, with additional longer feature articles weekly. While it seems like outsourcing gone crazy, and it’s hard to imagine how the reporters will get any real sense of the city from such a distance, at least this new service is actually covering its city hall in depth — I suspect there are plenty of North American cities whose city council gets hardly any scrutiny from the media. I also can’t help wondering if these outside observers might offer some interesting perspectives on what passes in local politics — they may end up being something like anthropologists.
(Be assured that Spacing has no plans to follow this lead in its coverage of city hall!).
photo by Payton Chung
