As
reported by the Associated Press Reuters Group PLC is going to use six journalists in their Bangalore, India offices to provide basic corporate announcement reporting on some 3,000 U.S. companies. Reuters reports that these are new positions that are not going to result in the replacement of any existing journalists in U.S. or other markets. Reworking corporate press releases and earnings statements has always been a news desk nuisance, never fully automatable but never taking a high level of jornalistic support, so this indeed represents a step forward for journalists heretofore assigned to low-value news items. There are surely any number of offshoring horror stories to be heard these days, but independent of the politics involved this movement promises to be a huge boon to the professional content industry, which is hard-pressed to defend licensed database margins using labor-intensive quality control techniques. If content companies can follow the Reuters example and create new opportunities for skilled employees in local and Indian markets through offshoring, they can build better margins not only through lowering production costs but by concentrating the efforts of the highest-skilled workers on the products that will provide the highest value.