Julie

A: In many ways, newspapers have been outsourcing work for as long as they have been using stringers and freelancers.

In that sense, parts of almost every newspaper are outsourced.

One of the new wrinkles in American industry is to outsource work overseas. It is possible, given technology, to have stories edited from anywhere in the world. What you call outsourcing some other might call telecommuting. Several years ago, a freelancer told me that a newspaper offered to send her a phonebook and have her write "local stories" from out of state. She declined.

One of the new wrinkles came last fall when the Contra Costa Times was having reporters in California write stories in English, which were then translated into Spanish by Danilo Black, a company in Mexico, for the Times' Spanish language Fronteras.