The
Hindustan Times
Reuters puts Bangalore on news map
HT Correspondent, October 09, 2004
In a move decried in the West as 'outsourcing of journalism' to
low-wage countries and defended by Reuters as globalization, the
London-headquartered financial news and information provider on
Thursday formally launched its operations in Bangalore.
Reuters which informally began operations here with a skeletal staff a
few months ago has already hired 340 employee consisting mostly of
data and technical staff and about 20 journalists and plans to raise
the headcount to about 1,500 in a year-and-a-half. Bangalore will thus
be the biggest information gathering hub within Reuters which has
close to 15,000 workforce worldwide, said Geert Linnebank,
editor-in-chief of Reuters.
From its Bangalore base, Reuters will cover, among other things, news
and developments of companies other parts of the world including the
US.
Answering a question, Reuters' global managing editor David
Schlesinger said the cost of setting up such a centre in Bangalore is
40 per cent less than setting it up in a place like New York but
refused to call this 'outsourcing'.
"We hire, train, monitor employees with the same standards and they
will have the same career path as elsewhere,'' Schlesinger said,
adding: "It's a question of investing in other places."
While some of the positions for which employees have been hired are
relocated to Bangalore from elsewhere, the rest are newly created
slots.
Linnebank said the Bangalore centre would be 'revolutionary' in the
sense that it 'separates' the location of a news development from the
location of the coverage of that news. "Otherwise, nothing has
changed. Reuters has always hired distinguished Indian journalists."
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