-By Warner Todd Huston
For months the Chicago Tribune has been suffering the slings and arrows of local critics for having hired a web-based company called Journatic (pronounced Jer-naa-tik) to write many of its small, “hyper local” stories for its Trib Local newspapers.
Critics lambasted the stories after it was discovered they were written by writers in the Philippines for 35 cents per piece — people that had never even heard of the Chicago suburbs they were writing about. Another big reason the Trib was so mercilessly mocked is because the stories often carried fake bylines with American names instead of the names of the Filipino writers that really wrote them.
It seemed to be a matter of integrity, to be sure. Stories written by foreigners but with fake American bylines seemed too much like calling a computer troubleshooting call-center in India and getting a thick-accented phone tech claiming to be “Linda in Omaha.”
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Chicago Tribune Journalism Offshoring Scandal Ends”