The high price of outsourcing our news

If you’re perusing this editorial, you are among the many readers of The Millerton News. There is, appropriately, an expectation on your part that as one of the Harlem Valley’s leading local newspapers our news is locally sourced, written and edited by a staff of people who live within the community. In making that assumption you would be absolutely correct.The Millerton News is one of the few independently-owned community newspapers left in the region. Our goal is “to report on the news of our communities accurately and fairly, fostering democracy and an atmosphere of open communication,” as is stated each week in our masthead.Those of us who work for The Millerton News, and its parent company, The Lakeville Journal Co. LLC, take great pride in what we do. We feel a sense of ownership in every article we write, each sentence we craft, every word we select. That, hopefully, is apparent in the quality of our work and in our dogged determination to report what we see — good, bad or indifferent. Those who write for the paper honor that sense of responsibility by stamping a byline on every article, a declaration of their commitment to what they have testified to in ink. (The exception being editorials, known to be penned by this paper’s editor.)It has just come out, however, that some of the giants in the field — major newspapers in Chicago, San Francisco and Houston — cannot say the same for themselves. They have been outsourcing much of their local news. That, in and of itself, seems like bad policy. How can a news source in the Philippines or Mexico accurately and responsibly report on local events in small communities in the U.S.? The practice is not uncommon, and includes coverage of local briefs, police blotters, high school sports results, school lunch menus, real estate sales, etc. Some of these things may sound trivial, but to the communities these events take place in, they’re not. They are the fabric our local towns and villages are made of, the news our residents care and speak about, with information people depend on daily.To make matters worse, the outsourced writers who are compiling the news have been using phony bylines to conceal their foreign names, turning the practice from a bad idea into a deceitful and fraudulent one. Readers deserve to know who is writing their news, which leads to another poor practice some papers follow.There are some newspapers that run articles without a byline, or that merely credit the paper’s staff, giving the individual writer complete anonymity. Granted, not every news piece merits a byline. Police blotters, for one, are fairly straightforward. They should (take note, Chicago Tribune) be obtained by a local reporter from the local police department or sheriff’s office. That’s it, cut and dry. No need for a byline.An article — lengthy, perhaps, with researched material and certainly with quotes — really requires the reporter’s byline. How else can those quotes be confirmed or the information challenged, if need be? Again, the writer needs to take ownership of his or her work. It’s unprofessional to do otherwise.With newspapers facing such an uncertain future in today’s digital age, and local community papers especially feeling the pinch, such poor procedures put the entire industry at jeopardy. According to the Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism’s State of the News Media 2012 Report, daily print circulation continued to decline in 2011, with paid circulation dropping 22.5 percent between 1997 and 2009. And there have also been layoffs, with a drop of nearly 30 percent of news professionals working since 2000. Certainly outsourcing “local” news can save many papers money, and the writers of those clips can hide behind pseudonyms, but can the newspaper industry really afford to lose its integrity? In the final analysis, the cost is simply too great.