Maureen Dowd, the trenchant Op-Ed columnist for the New York Times, is unsettled if not freaked out by the lengths that a Pasadena newsman has gone to combat the erosion of the newspaper and magazine industries by the Internet.

James Macpherson, publisher of an onliner, Pasadena Now, let go of seven staff reporters making $600 to $800 a week and turned their tasks over to service providers in India. He now pays $7.50 per thousand words, Dowd reports. Some of their reportage is a a little clunky, for there are simply some subtleties of American culture that a foreigner can’t grasp. But that doesn’t outweigh the savings. “The newspaper industry is coming to a General Motors moment — except there’s no one to bail them out,” says Macpherson.

Dowd quotes Dean Singleton, chairman of The Associated Press and head of a newspaper group, as saying that preproduction work on his papers is already “offshored” to India. What about writing and editorial? “In today’s world, whether your desk is down the hall or around the world, from a computer standpoint, it doesn’t matter.”

Everyone involved with book writing, editing, publishing, and agenting recognizes the truth of Singleton’s statement, but that doesn’t prevent us from experiencing a frisson of fear at its implications. Our next question is, can your editor at Random House or Penguin also be replaced by an “Offshori?”

Some of your book publisher’s tasks are probably performed by people overseas now. Production of many illustrated books, for instance, has for many years been turned over to cheap (by US standards) but superb printing craftsmen in Germany, Japan, Holland, China, Italy and elsewhere abroad. And today, almost all scanning and digitization of book texts is farmed out to foreigners.

But editorial? I’m dubious, but not because foreign people don’t speak and write English as well as US natives — many speak the King’s English.

No, it’s because of the water cooler. By which I mean that the culture in which editorial processes ferment can’t be reproduced by remote control, not even by teleconferencing. Editors gathered around the common cause of your manuscript produce a synergy that simply can’t be farmed out or piped in. They all speak the same language, and I’m not talking about English. (And by the way, these days it’s not a water cooler but a kitchenette with a state of the art coffee machine.)

The prospects for newspapers and magazines are scary and getting scarier, but the question of whether the book business as we know it will go the same way is still to be answered. It hasn’t exactly gone digital but is more digital than ever, and in a great many ways that’s good news. But conversion of books into e-books has not generated big profits any more than conversion of newspapers has. We have yet to figure out how to monetize e-books on the same scale as print editions. E-book sales per title haven’t remotely achieved the same numbers, nor has online advertising made up the gap. It’s hoped that programs like Google search may help the publishing industry to produce advertising revenue that will make e-books viable. That way, e-books can take their rightful place as partners with, not rivals to, print version.

Maureen Dowd’s column give us a lot to worry about, but the outsourcing of your editor’s job is, for now, not on the radar screen.

RC