Our man in Iceland checks in

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Think times are tough for American car companies? Have a look around your local paper's newsroom. If it's still local.
Things have been bad for newspapers for years now, and the current economic climate certainly isn't helping. Many papers have reeled in their circulations and severely cut back on staff. Many others have closed entirely. But some could continue humming along with a little outsourcing to stretch the budget.
With no newsprint bailout in sight, shipping the work abroad suddenly seems like a pretty good idea. In October, MediaNews Group CEO Dean Singleton suggested that such tasks as layout and copy-editing could be sent overseas. An online paper based in Pasadena, Calif., is written by an entire staff of Bangalore-based reporters.
In time, all the news that's fit to read could be written in foreign lands. But while cell phones and Internet connections can put an office anywhere, can actual reporting be managed abroad? There's only one way to find out.
In the spirit of journalistic inquiry, and in an effort to save my editors some Christmas money, I've elected to outsource the remainder of this column to Iceland.
My research has shown that while India is the destination du jour for customer service, there are better deals to be found for column inches. Iceland, as you may know, nearly fell into bankruptcy as a result of the troubled global economy. Its citizens will do virtually anything for a dollar, including, apparently, newspaper reporting.
And so, without further ado, I'll hand this over to Magnus.
Thank you, sir. And thank you, fellow American readers, for this opportunity.
As an American columnist, based in America, I understand your American troubles and disappointments. I will list them here.
As we know, life is made difficult by this troubled economy. How difficult, you may ask? So difficult that, as average Americans, we must eat two hamburgers daily instead of the common amount of three. Though still, on this diet of red meat, we are unable to lift small cars or throw telephone poles. But this is common for us.
The economy has made it such that we must outfit only one or two rooms in our large homes with plasma-screened televisions. Our bathrooms cannot feature high-definition, as we all strongly desire.
But we make good of our situation, and heartily celebrate our national festival of Thanks Giving. It is good that our country was settled merely four hundred years ago by weak and consumptive English peoples, and not mighty Nordic chieftains. I will explain why in columns to be written at a later time.
Until then, rest assured that as a fellow American citizen, I understand your lot and lives. We will share many similar experiences, including outrageous gas prices that are still orders of magnitude less than petrol on island nations in the Northern Atlantic Ocean. We will also discuss the common experience of unemployment. And we will laugh heartily as we discuss such things.
For now, I leave my unemployed readers with a common American saying: There are plenty of other fish in the sea. It is sometimes true, however, that naturally born fishermen with the sea woven into their hearts are more likely to get the fish.
And, also, journalism degrees do not improve one's fishing.

(Ben Grabow writes for the young, the urban and the easily amused. Contact him at thinlyread(at)gmail.com.)

(Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service, http://www.scrippsnews.com)
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