<<<<< JOB DESTRUCTION NEWSLETTER  No. 1944 -- 12/15/2008 >>>>>

Sorry for the subject title -- it's a bit deceiving. You probably thought
this was a "good news / bad news" message, but actually it's actually more
of a "bad news / funny news" theme.

If you haven't heard, Dell now has tech call-centers in the U.S. There is a
catch though -- if you want to talk to their U.S. center instead of "Larry"
or "Linda" in Bangalore or Manila, you have to pay a premium.

http://www.mercurynews.com/ci_11233498?nclick_check=1
Dell offers call center service based in North America -- for a price

<<<<<>>>>>

There have been 15,153 newspaper lay-offs in America so far this year.
Guess where some of those jobs are going? Answer: "Reporters" based in
India are paid $7.50 or 1,000 words to write stories for local newspapers
in the U.S. So, next time you read a story about a car accident near your
house, or the murder in your neighborhood, just remember where it may have
been authored. LOL!


http://business.timesonline.co.uk/tol/business/industry_sectors/media/articl
e5333712.ece
Read all about it! US newspapers fall prey to the internet and recession


+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

http://www.mercurynews.com/ci_11233498?nclick_check=1

Dell offers call center service based in North America -- for a price
Posted: 12/15/2008 12:00:00 AM PST


If you prefer a customer service agent who speaks "American," then computer
maker Dell has a deal for you.

Catering to consumers put off by the accents of Bangalore, Manila and other
call-center hubs around the globe, Dell will guarantee -- for a price --
that the person who picks up the phone on a support call will be, as
company ads mention in bold text, "based in North America."

The Your Tech Team service, with agents in the United States, costs $13 a
month for customers with a Dell account, or $99 a year for people who buy a
new computer. It also promises that wait times will average two minutes or
less. Without the upgrade, a customer can get free technical help, but
probably from someone in India, the Philippines or the other places where
Dell has operators.

By charging customers extra for a North American voice, Dell's program
represents a novel strategy for easing the strains of globalization while
maintaining profit, industry officials said.

Occasionally, "we've heard from customers that it's hard to understand a
particular accent and that they couldn't understand the instructions they
were getting," said Dell spokesman Bob Kaufman. "This illustrates Dell's
commitment to customer choice."

Complaints about customer service agents based in other countries are an
everyday phenomenon across several industries. For many U.S. consumers, the
diverse accents that come across customer service lines constitute one

of the most pervasive reminders of globalization and the offshoring of
jobs. That can make personnel in the call center targets for American
anger.

Companies can save 50 to 75 percent on their call centers by putting them
overseas, according to industry analysts.

But getting a customer service agent with whom it is easy to communicate
ought to be a service that is provided gratis, some industry analysts said.


"Most people in the customer service world believe that if you have sold me
a product, then support for that product should be free," said Lyn Kramer,
managing director of Kramer and Associates, a call-center consultancy.

Jitterbug, a cell-phone company that markets to older Americans, similarly
boasts in ads that its operators are in the United States, but it does not
charge extra to speak to them. The company's television spots advertise
"U.S.-based customer service" and show a headset draped in an American
flag.

"You'd be amazed how many customers ask, 'Where are you based?' " said
David Inns, Jitterbug's chief executive. "The response we get when we say,
'We're in Auburn Hills, Michigan, ma'am,' -- well, they love it."

Although airlines, banks and some retailers have overseas call centers,
computer makers have been particularly apt to put call centers in foreign
countries. According to an online survey conducted by CFI Group, more than
a third of respondents who recently made a call for computer support
reported that the person they reached was outside the United States.

The customer satisfaction score for overseas PC call centers was 23 percent
lower than for U.S. call centers, CFI Group reported.

"The customers say, 'The agent just doesn't understand what I'm trying to
do,' " Kramer said. "The customer explains his or her request three or four
times, and then they get a rote answer back."

Many companies, she said, have "escalation procedures" to use when callers
struggle to communicate; eventually, many such calls are routed back to the
United States.

Though some have suggested that the friction between U.S. consumers and
foreign operators arises from prejudice, some observers see it differently.


"I hear people say all the time that people who complain about call centers
in India are being racist or nativist -- but it's not as simple as that,"
said Sharmila Rudrappa, a sociology professor at the University of Texas at
Austin and native of Bangalore, India. "If you need tech support, it
already shows you're having a crazy time getting your Dell computer to
work. And when things go haywire, you want assurance, you want familiarity,
you want someone to hold your hand and say it's OK. What you don't want is
to have to work at understanding the person on the other end of the line."

Deepak Desai, chief executive of GlobalEnglish, a company that sells a
program to improve the business-English skills of overseas workers,
attributed at least some of the problem in India to the call center
industry's trouble recruiting employees who have mastered the language.

"There's a large chunk of people who can communicate in English somewhat,
but if you put them on a call interacting with an angry American -- that's
hard," he said.

Though the job puts them in contact with people halfway around the world
who are often upset about something -- a missed reservation, a technical
problem, an accounting situation -- many in developing countries consider
such a spot in a call center "a good job," Desai said. They try to learn
American slang, to say "zee" instead of "zed," and they take on
American-sounding nicknames such as Jimmy.

"People in the developing countries are hungry for any material that will
improve their skills," Desai said. "There's a real hunger to improve."

Enough Americans are so frustrated by them, however, that companies such as
Jitterbug have concluded that keeping their call centers in the United
States is the best option.

Inns said the company briefly considered putting its call center overseas
-- he, too, had heard that costs could be radically cut.

But he said those estimates leave out the cost of frustrating customers.

"What's missing from those estimates is what the impact is on customer
satisfaction and what is the impact on first-call resolution" -- that is,
resolving the issue in one try.


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http://business.timesonline.co.uk/tol/business/industry_sectors/media/articl
e5333712.ece

December 13, 2008

Read all about it! US newspapers fall prey to the internet and recession

'Newshounds' such as Cary Grant and Rosalind Russell in His Girl Friday
(1940) are things of the past, with stories being 'outsourced' to India

James Bone in New York
The American journalist was once a notoriously hard-boiled character with
sharp elbows and a press pass tucked into the band of his fedora.

In the era of the classic film The Front Page, set in the 1920s, reporters
from rival city dailies used their most devious means to get the drop on
the rest and claim a scoop.

Now those local stories may be "outsourced" to be written by a low-paid
journalist in India and posted on the internet instead.

The US newspaper industry is in a full-blown crisis that has seen its
business model dynamited by technology and its dwindling prospects
threatened by the financial meltdown, which has, in effect, forced
advertising revenue off a cliff.

In the past week the Tribune Company, which owns the Chicago Tribune and
the Los Angeles Times, has sought bankruptcy protection from its creditors.


The sense of gloom emanating from staff at the two newspapers was
heightened by prosecutors' allegations that the disgraced Illinois Governor
Rod Blagojevich had tried to force Sam Zell, the new owner of Tribune
Company, to dismiss Chicago Tribune editorial writers who had called for
his impeachment.

As the FBI issued subpoenas, Mr Zell said - to some scepticism - that it
was news to him.

The atmosphere at the Los Angeles Times was already so sour that a group of
current and former reporters had filed a suit challenging Mr Zell's
acquisition of the company. An insider set up a blog for disgruntled staff
entitled "Tell Zell".

Post-bankruptcy, the columnist Joel Stein began his piece yesterday by
writing: "This column may not meet the high levels of quality to which I
have made you accustomed. That's because I haven't been getting paid."

He went on in similarly acerbic tone: "I immediately e-mailed Zell's office
and offered to let him work off the debt. My first choice, I explained,
would be to have him do stuff around my house, because I'm two years into a
six-month renovation and no one is showing up any more. But I also gave him
the option of doing something that plays to his talents: accounting work."

Also this week, The New York Times, the venerable "Old Gray Lady" of
American journalism, announced that it would mortgage its prestigious new
Renzo Piano-designed headquarters in Times Square in an effort to raise
money.

"There is no quick, easy response to the sea changes already disrupting our
industry before the financial meltdown of this fall," Katharine Weymouth,
the Washington Post publisher, said in a bleak memo to her staff. At least
30 daily newspapers are up for sale around the country, including famous
names such as The Miami Herald. Some local institutions, such as the
149-year-old Rocky Mountain News in Colorado, are in danger of folding
altogether. The revived New York Sun has already closed its doors and the
Christian Science Monitor has decided to print only once a week.

The Paper Cuts blog, which tracks redundancies, counts 15,153 newspaper
lay-offs in America so far this year. The prognosis is so bad that some say
the industry has reached a "General Motors moment" when it can no longer be
profitable and needs a car industry-style bailout.

Writing in the New Republic magazine Mark Pinsky, a former Orlando Sentinel
reporter, proposed that Barack Obama revive the Depression-era Federal
Writers Project to put unemployed journalists to work.

"Today, there are many dislocated ‘old media' journalists from
newspapers, radio and television on the street - here I declare my personal
interest, as one of them - who could provide a skilled pool to staff a new
FWP," Mr Pinsky wrote.

It is all a far cry from the heyday of swashbuckling press barons a century
ago, such as William Randolph Hearst, the model for Orson Welles's Citizen
Kane, and New York World publisher Joseph Pulitzer, who gave his name to
the prestigious prizes.

The era gave birth to the pejorative term "yellow journalism" because of a
Hearst-Pulitzer war to get control of a popular comic strip called Hogan's
Alley, featuring an urchin named The Yellow Kid. Hearst enjoyed so much
power that he is once, famously, said to have cabled an artist on
assignment for his New York Journal in Cuba in 1898: "You furnish the
pictures and I'll furnish the war."

The golden age lasted half a century, from 1880 to 1930. At its peak,
America boasted 2,600 daily newspapers, with at least half a dozen in every
large city. New York alone once had nearly 30 daily newspapers.

David Laventhol, the respected former publisher of The Los Angeles Times
and president of Times-Mirror, said newspaper industry leaders had failed
to confront the challenge of new technology. "It's never happened before at
this level and they have not handled it well at all. They have put so much
emphasis on the cost side they are losing their product," he said.

A rare exception is last year's $5 billion purchase of Dow Jones Co, which
owns The Wall Street Journal, by News Corporation, parent company of The
Times. After a bitter takeover battle, the acquisition has earned Rupert
Murdoch - News Corp's chairman and chief executive - a determined critic of
the newspaper naysayers - some grudging respect among the American
journalistic establishment for daring to invest in the troubled sector.
"One of the key people is Rupert Murdoch. He thinks newspapers can function
in this new society," Mr Laventhol said.

The industry faces an insurgency on the internet from news portals such as
the Drudge Report, the Huffington Post, and the Daily Beast, founded by
Tina Brown, the former British editor of the New Yorker and Vanity Fair.

Perhaps the most controversial upstart, however, is a "mom-and-pop" news
site in Pasadena, California, called PasadenaNow.

James Macpherson, the site's founder, has outraged journalistic purists by
"offshoring" stories to news writers in India, who are paid $7.50 (£5)
for 1,000 words. Mr Macpherson admits that he does not know where half of
his six Indian news writers live; he sends them raw material such as press
releases, web video or transcribed interviews, which they turn into news
stories .

"I have reinvigorated the way in the 1920s and 1930s legmen worked with a
rewrite desk, with a technological bent. The rewrite man in this case might
be in Bangalore," he said.

"The technology today allows us to cover Pasadena and send it to writers in
India, the way the conflict in Afghanistan is covered and the drones are
controlled from Nevada."


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