The New Haven Advocate pulled a pretty sharp stunt this week, outsourcing nearly all of the paper’s editorial content to freelance writers in India. That may seem pretty clever. But I wonder if the Indian journos who contributed knew they were being set up as punchlines. Somehow, I doubt it. And that’s not cool.

I lived in India for a year in 2007-2008. I worked for several months as an editor at Delhi Press, the largest and oldest magazine publishing company in the country. I know dozens if not hundreds of Indian journalists. Some are excellent. Others, lousy. But the Advocate’s little publicity stunt does none of them any justice, and betrays a shallow understanding of India and its news media. For instance, the Advocate lumps the ethically-bankrupt Times of India in with the BBC and The Guardian as counting among a reporter’s “impressive credentials,” and holds up its own freelancers (whose work it later tears down rather unfairly) as “the best writers we could find (and afford).” The implication is that these writers are among India’s best. From the handful of outsourced Advocate pieces I read, they are clearly not. It may be true that the English writing skills of the average Indian journalist are not equal to those of the average U.S. journalist. But there are plenty of Indian journos who can write circles — in English or any other language — around nearly every American journalist I know. If the Advocate was really interested in getting the best Indian journalists it could afford, maybe it should have done some, y’know, reporting and found writers like him or him or her.

The stated motive for the Connecticut paper’s stunt is something of a straw man anyway. Citing outrage over Pasadena Now’s 2007 announcement that it would outsource some local coverage to reporters in India, the Advocate argues that you must live locally to provide good local coverage.

How do you coordinate an interview between an Indian journalist and a California musician used to dealing with American writers, with a 12-plus-hour time difference? How can you review restaurants and plays when you can’t taste the food or see the show? How do you get the news tips people drop in casual conversation in the town clerk’s office or the local pub?

And:

Call us old-school, but we think good, old-fashioned shoe-leather journalism is worth the price. Outsourcing could certainly fill pages, probably very cheaply, but what’s lost is the very essence of local newspapers: presence. At city hall, the local music club or out on the street talking up average folks, presence is what sets local newspapers (dinosaurs though they are sometimes) apart, and what outsourced news could never replace.

I agree. Call me old-school too. Those are fair questions and points — or at least they would be if anyone was seriously arguing that U.S. publications ought to outsource local restaurant reviews and man-on-the-street pieces to Hyderabad.

Of course, some U.S. publications are considering outsourcing some editorial operations to India. Some already have. I wrote this piece last year about a first-rate Indian company called Express KCS that was writing and editing ad copy and, it hoped, copy editing certain editorial sections for a number of U.S. papers. But even they said they had no designs on actually covering American communities from India. I wonder who exactly the Advocates‘ staff was challenging when they referred to “some media honchos” who “might flirt with, or dabble in, outsourced news.” I’ve reported fairly extensively from both the U.S. and India on outsourcing of editorial jobs from the former to the latter, and can’t name a single “media honcho” here who’s considering such a thing. Unless Pasadena Now publisher James MacPherson counts as a “media honcho.” And when I got MacPherson on the phone last spring, he very humbly told me that the media storm over his outsourcing decision had been “devastating.” That’s not honcho talk.

Makes you wonder what point the Advocate was trying to make, what exactly it was hoping to accomplish. Other than insulting a billion people, of course.