The Winston-Salem Journal reported that customer service calls for its circulation department will be outsourced to a company based in the Phillipines.  More interesting to me was a comment that the managing editor Ken Otterbourg left on his blog in response to another comment left by a reader on a post that had nothing to do with the outsourcing story (his post was about photography on the Blue Ridge Parkway):

Reader’s comment: I love great photographs.  Hopefully you guys won’t be outsourcing your photography to Manila any time soon.

Capitalism is alive and well in W-S (and the non-US areas we send our jobs to.)

Ken’s comment: Thanks for the comments. I’m not going to minimize the import or
symbolism of the movement of our customer-support operations. But I do
think that it speaks well of our newspaper that we reported this. For
job cuts at this level, many publications would not report them. We
thought it was important to do so, from a credibility standpoint and
also from a fairness standpoint, because we’ve reported extensively on
IT and back-office operations in this area moving offshore.

I think Ken makes a good point, and I’m glad to see that the Journal is engaging in a little transparency.  I do ask though that they order the company not to use fake American names for its representatives. Nothing more annoying than talking to another "Jack" who’s real name is Arjun or a "Mary" who’s real name is "Ashakiran".

This story reminds me of something I’ve been meaning to look into.  Does anyone have access to the total number of NC jobs lost to overseas companies in the last 10-20 years?  If so, how about a yearly breakdown and a breakdown by industry?  I’m thinking I can get it off the state’s website somewhere but if someone already has it I’d love to see it without duplicating the work.