Inside the city’s Reuters office the company’s six reporters face each other across open-plan desks dotted with black IBM computer screens, ready for work.
Their night starts as, halfway round the world, the New York Stock Exchange opens for another day. They work until it closes — at 4pm in New York and 1.30am in Bangalore — compiling tables, polling analysts and writing stories on the American stock markets.
They file their news stories into the Reuters wire system, which is eagerly read by customers using the media group’s 330,000 terminals in America and elsewhere. Then, at 4am, before the streets outside start to fill again, they return home.
Soon there will be more than six reporters working through the night. Last week Reuters announced it plans to increase their number to 40 by the middle of next year, leading directly to a loss of 20 jobs in Europe and America. Some of these will be jobs from Reuters’ London operation, although the company would not confirm how many.
In Bangalore, Reuters journalists will be paid a quarter of the amount staff could expect in Britain, where a trainee correspondent starts on about £26,000.
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This is the first time the impact of offshoring has been felt in an industry that has generated much of the hype surrounding it — the media.
Reuters concedes that the main reason for the offshoring is to save money. But David Schlesinger, the company’s global managing editor, said: “My hope is that subscribers won’t notice where a story is written. I don’t think you can tell whether a story is written or edited in London, New York or Bangalore.”
Reuters, which employs about 2,300 journalists worldwide, has been cutting costs in recent years in a bid to keep up with rivals.
The company was unprofitable for the first time in its 19-year history as a public company in 2002, and announced plans in 2003 to cut 3,000 jobs over three years. The same year, Reuters established a separate office in Bangalore where 300 staff collect and input the financial and market data available on its global subscriber service.
The company returned to profit last year. Encouraged by this, in April it set up a pilot scheme, recruiting its team of six Indian journalists from a mix of local reporters and university graduates.
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Their work is to monitor American markets and other news wires, compiling tables and writing stories under the guidance of Reuters’ head of US equities, who is based in America. Company documents that used to be readable only in hard copy are now available online — as accessible in India as in America.
“We have been in India for many years and have always employed local journalists for our Delhi and Mumbai bureaus,” said Schlesinger. “Now, with the technology available, we are able to base more operations where we can be more efficient and we can get trained, experienced people for a much lower cost.”
Reuters now plans to uproot its global editorial reference unit in London and move it to India. As yet, Reuters’ competitors, Bloomberg and Dow Jones, have no plans to follow suit but said they are watching what happens with interest.
The British newspaper industry is also keeping an eye on the scheme. Express Group newspapers moved some of its sub-editing and layout work from London to Preston in 2002.
Reuters’ remote American correspondents represent the latest in a long line of jobs, from call-centre operators to radiologists, that have been shipped off-shore in recent years.
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Research this week from the IT analyst Forrester predicts that 750,000 UK jobs will be offshored in the next 10 years. Of these, about one in 10 will be highly qualified professional positions previously thought secure, including architects, lawyers and pure scientists.
In that time, Forrester predicts almost 4,000 jobs will be lost from Britain’s media sector.
The report’s author, Andrew Parker, said: “It will begin to be a significant issue. I already see some evidence of publications that are using staff in India, and this is something that is likely to increase over the next few years. Fairly sophisticated market-research companies are also starting to use people in India in place of staff in Europe.”