My first real job was as a reporter for a daily newspaper. I worked at night, stationed in a satellite bureau office, covering crime, suburban city council meetings, that sort of thing. The most terrifying part of the job was when it was time for the late evening television newscasts.

The ritual was the same every night. The few reporters who worked at the bureau gathered nervously around a little black-and-white TV. When the first story came up and we saw that it was not from our suburban territory, we quickly switched to a different newscast. If that station’s top story was, say, a dispatch from the other side of town, we quickly switched to the third station. Then back to the first. And on it went. If all three stations exhausted the first 14 or 15 minutes of their broadcasts without breaking a meaningful story from our territory, that was a successful night for us. To this day, I exhale with relief when the weathercaster comes on.

But once in a while, maybe every two or three weeks, our ritual channel surfing turned up a heart-stopping moment: a TV news story right out of the very territory that was our duty to cover and defend journalistically.

And if the TV reporter broke a story that was really good, that was disaster. Our reaction to the scoop was always the same. First, my fellow open-mouthed reporters and I spewed disbelieving expletives. Then, about 10 seconds later, the phone lit up. It was the editor. Screaming.

What’s amazing, looking back, is not that we did all that channel changing manually, but that reporters for local TV stations actually competed with print reporters. Back then, TV reporters weren’t numerous but they had sources, and they worked their beats. They broke stories. Even in the suburbs.

That era was followed by a long slide in the quality of local TV journalism. The more TV news operations settled into the low ground – house fires, inane health tips, celebrity silliness – the less we in the print world respected and feared them. To be honest, I haven’t paid much attention to the late local news for years.

And that brings us to James Macpherson, the Pasadena news entrepreneur who made his own news – and shocked the journalism world – a few years ago when he hired reporters in India to cover events in Pasadena. Like my colleagues, I deemed his plan insulting, stupid and doomed.

But he survived. Now Macpherson is expanding his operating template to a web television station, as you can see in the article on page 1. Very low-wage reporters and video editors in other countries will help him cover Pasadena.

I still don’t like his method. But I’m starting to warm up to his broader point, if grudgingly. If he’s saying that local TV stations and web operations need to be open to cheaper ways to cover news, OK, point made.

Since so much territory has been ceded by journalists, I have to conclude that, what the heck, it’s better to have people in some faraway land “covering” an open area. Particularly since it seems so few news operations here have the wit or the will to do so.

Perhaps we’re moving to a template in which low-wage foreign reporters cover the basics – crime news, routine city council decisions, earnings reports – and leave the more nuanced and difficult stories to a few well-paid local journalists. That may be a way for news operations to afford more and better coverage. No, it ain’t a great plan, but it’s better than giving ground and doing nothing more. And, who knows? If the few local reporters were truly free to work their sources, maybe they could break an occasional story.

My hope is that before my career ends, I once again look at the clock at night and wonder, with some fear and respect, whether the local competing TV and web-based news operations have a surprise scoop tonight.

Charles Crumpley is editor of the Business Journal. He can be reached at [email protected].