Its been a great few weeks for news — that is if you completely hate the idea of people covering interesting events and helping you understand what is going on in the world.

Stephen Colbert may have summed it up best recently when he told Fox News and CNN, “You suck at news.” Between their idiotic mishaps of declaring “Obamacare” dead in the water, despite being completely wrong about the U.S. Supreme Court ruling, and This American Life shedding light on the fact that all too much of our news is actually being outsourced to the Philippines, it has been a pretty dismal week for anyone who still, probably foolishly, believes news is important for letting the common people know about facts of all things.

I suppose the exception here is that everyone has jumped on board to point out how stupid FOX and CNN are for blowing their load before they got past the first page of the ruling.

The real issue however is the exposure of the outsourcing of local news. Not so much because “ther givin away good Amurrican jobs” (although that too) but mostly because it’s dumbing down our news and killing our newsrooms. The Tribune Company, publisher of the Chicago Tribune, Los Angeles Times and many other publications, laid off or “phased out” 40 jobs from their Trib Local community news outlets in favour of outsourcing to Journatic, the “journalism” outsourcing company at the heart of this issue. Basically, they cover all the boring day-to-day stories like police reports and sports stats and council meetings. This then frees up the newspapers’ reporters to do more important, time-intensive stories — in theory. What actually happens is that journalists who live in and understand communities lose their jobs in exchange for people with no connection to a community turning out re-written press releases. And we are all going to be stupider for it.

Brian Timpone, the CEO of Journatic, has told a number of news outlets including Poynter and This American Life, that he is here to help make news better by taking on the grunt work like scouring police blotters. However, when major publishers are laying off newsrooms in order to outsource to Journatic it suggests Timpone’s business model may be less about helping out the industry and more about capitalizing on a floundering business side of journalism that is ready to fill space between ads regardless of quality or journalistic integrity. This might be evident when you consider that Journatic and its affiliate BlockShopper.com used aliases in bylines rather than the names of the outsourced writers from the Philippines.

Furthermore, if Timpone had the best of intentions for the work he does, it seems unlikely he would offer gag money to his staff who were approached by meddling journalists asking pesky questions about their journalism practices. Everyone knows there is nothing journalists hate more than journalists doing their job. Maybe I’m just old fashioned but it seems to me that if a journalism outlet is afraid of having its own leaks about how it conducts its work, then it does not represent the people, thus, it doesn’t get to count itself as part of the Fourth Estate.

Ryan Smith, the young struggling journalist who leaked the story first to The Chicago Reader and then to This American Life, described the infiltration of cheap outsourced “hyper-local” news as follows to Poynter:

“People didn’t think much about the beef they were eating until someone exposed the practice of putting so-called ‘pink slime’ into ground beef,” he said in an email. “Once it came out, the food industry moved quickly to change it. I feel like companies like Journatic are providing the public ‘pink slime’ journalism.”

The good news coming out of this is that at least two of Journatic’s customers have decided to sever ties with company following This Amercian Life’s story on Journatic. Gatehouse Media, which owns over 100 papers across the United States, and the Chicago Sun-Times have announced they will be ending their relationship with Journatic after internal investigations found numerous cases of false crediting on articles purchased from Journatic’s subsidiary BlockShopper. Perhaps these two companies have had a closer look at the pink slime?

David Arkin, the Vice President of Content & Audience for Gatehouse, told Poynter they intend to create an in-house content hub to replace the work previously outsourced to Journatic. Arkin estimates that they will be able to do this for the same amount. Arkin also told Poynter that one of the reasons for ending the relationship was that stories from Journatic required too much editing and follow-up by his in-house staff and therefore they were not able to have their journalists focus on the heavy-hitting stories Timpone claimed his company would enable journalists to get back to.

Nothing has come out yet about similar outsourcing in Canada but we can be sure it exists to some extent. The downsizing of newsrooms, on the other hand, is well underway on this side of the border.

In case you’re feeling down about the fate of journalism, here are two things that should make you a little more optimistic.

Our friends at OpenFile are producing real community “hyper local” journalism, with journalists who actually live in the communities they cover. A novel idea, really, and we congratulate them on thinking of it.

And here is a lovely article from The Guardian about the uber-successful ProPublica, an independent non-profit investigative journalism organization, funded through private donations that is helping to produce fantastic investigative pieces in the U.S.

Poynter This American LifeMorgueFile