Distracted by a Web site covering Dixie like...

Searching for a D-Day story about a World War II foreign correspondent for a history article, I stumbled on something new instead: Like the Dew, a Journal of Southern Culture & Politics launched in March and aiming to live up to the old Atlanta Journal motto, "We cover Dixie like the Dew."

According to the site's "about" page, Like the Dew plans to draw on free-lance contributors to report on news and life in 16 states from Florida to Maryland and Texas to West Virginia. More than 50 contributors are already listed, but the mainstays are founder Keith Graham of Atlanta, who spent more than 25 years at the Atlanta Journal and Constitution, and site designer Lee Leslie, whose background is advertising, marketing and blogging. Between them, they've contributed more than 80 articles. Other contributors include Mike Williams, a former Cox Newspapers foreign correspondent, and Eleanor Ringel Cater, long-time movie critic for the Journal and Constitution.

(While the Dew falls heaviest in Georgia, the site isn't exclusively Atlanta -- I see a story about a Appalachian trail maintenance here in Southwest Virginia, others from Florida and Alabama, one about a Texas graduation, and there are a couple of my former colleagues at the University of Tennessee on the contributor list.)

So what does any of this have to do with my original search for that D-Day reporter? Not much; just some Web serendipity. The hits at LikeTheDew.com weren't the right ones, but they did include two stories that kept me reading, a D-Day landing account in a 1944 letter from Graham's uncle, and "'Evil Reporter Chick' Moni Basu is OK," University of Georgia journalism student Anna Dolianitis's profile of another Atlanta Journal-Constitution reporter, a former war correspondent, but from the wrong war for my search.

Basu was one of 73 of the AJC's staff who took a buyout this year, after working as a foreign correspondent in Iraq, among other things. So far, she isn't on the Like the Dew contributor list, but Basu is still in journalism -- and still in Atlanta -- at CNN Wire.

Connecticut news outsourced to Indian staff

Hartford Advocate: News - Outsource This!:
"We hired Indian freelance journalists to write the paper this week...

"Vanishing revenues have put the newspaper industry in a death spiral and many papers long ago outsourced other functions (like IT support centers and telemarketing) to India. We devised this issue as an experiment on what outsourced news might look like."

Back when I worked for The Hartford Courant, I remember delivering a bundle of copies of the first issue of The Hartford Advocate to the University of Connecticut for my next-door neighbor, one of the four people who started the paper.

As I recall, Ed, Linda and another couple launched the whole Advocate chain after Ed and the other guy got fed up with "part-time" copydesk jobs at the the now-fading but then-independent Hartford Courant... which eventually was gobbled up by a chain, which was gobbled up by another chain, which then bought the Advocate alt-weeklies.

So much for "alt." But it's good to see someone still has a sense of humor.

UPDATE: The New York Times reports on the same "outsourcing" stunt, but closes with a nice shout-out to former Advocate staffer Paul Bass's New Haven Independent, a Web-only newspaper that has concentrated on what you might call "in-sourcing" his city.

"Mr. Bass said he liked the outsourced issue, but it reminded him, alas, that so much of American journalism these days actually can be done from a desk in Mumbai, and that the threat facing most American newspapers isn’t necessarily outsourcing or even the new frontier of the Internet. It’s dull, stodgy products that have been downsized and bled dry by corporate owners. If what you do can be done, however imperfectly, from Mumbai, he said, then maybe you need to go back to Square One."

To see what I mean by "in-sourcing," which involves having your feet, head and heart in a local community, see this story and this story, including their background links. Nothing there looks "phoned in" -- not from Mumbai; not even from some office across town.