A local news Web site's editor who hired two reporters in India to cover suburban Pasadena said he's been so overwhelmed by handling reaction to his plan that he had to postpone publication of their first stories.
James Macpherson said he hasn't found the time he hoped to have to train one of his new staffers to cover Monday night's City Council meeting, which is shown live on the Web.
"We've been prevented from doing that due to the attention that we've received," Macpherson said Monday.
Last week he hired the reporters and wanted to have started posting their stories on pasadenanow.com by now. One based in the Indian financial center of Mumbai will watch the meetings, which often go past midnight, and use the time difference (early morning here is early afternoon in India) to write summaries so readers in the city near Los Angeles can log on Tuesday mornings and find out what happened.
Macpherson said he's working with the reporters on stories he intends to post before next Monday's meeting. As a Pasadena native, he said, he knows the city and its players and will ensure stories written from afar are fair and accurate.
Many newsrooms already are facing job and coverage cuts and Macpherson's plan struck a nerve when The Associated Press first reported its details Thursday.
Since then, Macpherson has spoken with more newspapers, TV and radio stations than he can name and hasn't had time to do interview requests from as far away as Australia and France.
Reaction has fallen into two camps.
Many within journalism have pilloried the idea of covering local news from half a world away - or suggested it must be a publicity stunt. As Larry Wilson, editor of the local Pasadena Star-News paper wrote in a column, how could an Indian reporter know whether a council member was joking when he made his remarks?
Others agree with Macpherson, who pointed out that desk-bound reporting is commonplace in an increasingly lean news industry.
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