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Despite threats of legal action, Reuters Bangalore, continues with its expansion plans. Geert Linnebank talks about their local centre
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Geert Linnebank: `Bangalore is a global centre with functions that were hitherto carried out in other parts of the world.' — Photo: Sampath Kumar G.P.
REUTERS HAS launched a global centre in Bangalore, outsourcing not just some of the financial work that forms the core of its business, but editorial functions relating to the U.S. companies as well. But now the Newspaper Guild of New York, a union, which includes over 500 Reuters staff, has threatened to take the media company to court over their announcement to retrench 20 people in favour of the employees hired in Bangalore, charging Reuters of violating an earlier contract. Reuters' Global Managing director David Schlesinger says that these differences in view are normal in any contract and he expects they will be resolved soon.
Geert Linnebank Reuters' Editor-in-Chief spoke to Metroplus on its global centre in Bangalore.
What brings you to Bangalore? Cheaper costs?
That certainly is a factor, but it is by no means the only factor. There is a determination to pursue quality and a place such as Bangalore allows us to expand the range of services, of content that we gather and disseminate because it's economically viable. Also because of the quality of the people that we can attract and the quality of the general infrastructural environment, the training levels, and the scale we can achieve in a single centralised facility such as the one we are building up here is larger.
We can create teams which really specialise and understand the subject matter and will be able to consistently and systematically produce to very high standards, much more so than when you operate in smaller centres where people do a little bit of this and a little bit of that. It's important to recognise that unlike may be some other off-shore initiatives that we're seeing in this town, what we're putting here is right at the centre of the Reuters product. There is the news and then there is the numerical data component. We're not putting some aspects of our work which are on the periphery.
What's the significance of the Bangalore operations within the larger Reuters framework?
It's a global centre with functions that were hitherto carried out in other parts of the world — North America, Britain, and other parts of Asia. On the editorial side, the initiatives we've announced so far involve U.S. company news which is quite heavily regulated in the way it gets distributed and companies have to disseminate electronically or through feeds.
So the main work here will be financial news? Not political, at all?
We believe that we want to be as close to the action as we physically can be and we've built up the most extensive reporting network that any of the news agencies has. We have 200 bureaus in 130 countries with journalists and photographers. It's their job to report what needs reporting on the ground. So if there's a political crisis or a plane crash, we can't do that remotely... we have to be on the ground to report what we see. But what is emerging on the back of the Internet and the regulatory environment is a whole class of information available anywhere in the world and it doesn't matter really where you are; the delocalisation of a type of information. But I wouldn't ever imagine Reuters moving to a situation where we would be in Bangalore and cover a press conference in another location!
How big are you aiming to be here in Bangalore?
We've talked about 350 positions this year between the data management and the editorial possibly doubling that in the course of the next year. I expect that as we get better established here the number might rise further.
Will there be retrenching elsewhere to provide for the jobs here?
Well, not yet. We started experimenting with this editorial concept. Initially six journalists here were asked to cover a section of the U.S. market we didn't cover until now. So it was an expansion — we weren't taking work away from people in the U.S., we were expanding. Now that that pilot is proving successful, were looking to expand the team and for them to start to take on some of the roles performed by some of their colleagues in the U.S.. So there will be migration of work that might possibly lead to job losses amongst the people currently performing that work, although that's not entirely clear because we might be able to reassign some of those to other tasks. We estimate that the work of 20 employees will be moved to Bangalore.
HEMANGINI GUPTA
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