Pasadena, California: home to the Rose Bowl, roving parrots and what may be the first U.S. news editor to hire people in India to cover city council.

James Macpherson is the proprietor of Pasadenanow.com, a magaziney-looking Web site dedicated to covering the Los Angeles suburb. According to several media reports, he recently placed an ad on Craigslist.org’s Indian site looking for two reporters to cover city council — and it’s not your typical notion of the globetrotting foreign correspondent.

Among the coverage:

- The Los Angeles Times: “[Macpherson] hired two reporters last weekend to cover the Pasadena City Council. One lives in Mumbai and will be paid $12,000 a year. The other will work in Bangalore for $7,200. … The council broadcasts its meetings on the Web. From nearly 9,000 miles away, the outsourced journalists plan to watch, then write their stories while their boss sleeps India is 12.5 hours ahead of Pacific Standard Time.” 

- Deepikaglobal.com, “the latest news for global Indians:”The publication’s staff in Pasadena would record and photograph all the required meetings and interviews and send them to India through e-mail. … Pasadena Now said that it would pay the journalists a 40- hour per week salary and recompense them for international telephone calls, while adding that the compensation would be commensurate with professional journalism pay levels for full-time employment of ‘Lead Reporters.’ … The organisation is seeking one or two 500-word articles each day Monday through Friday and two weekly in-depth special reports focused on the City Council’s weekly council meeting.”

- The Associated Press: “[Macpherson] said it can be done from afar now that weekly Pasadena City Council meetings can be watched over the Internet. And he said the idea makes business sense because of India’s lower labor costs.”

- The Online Journalism Review, with commentary by Robert Niles from the Annenberg school at USC: “Indian contractors might crank out the copy, but engaging newswriting flows from solid reporting. A reporter needs more points of contact with a community than webcast meetings and an e-mail inbox to find the stories that a well-informed readership demands.” (He also notes that there are plenty of U.S. news outlets that fail to do much more)

We’re counting on our readers to jump in on this debate. Is this a good idea for local news?

(Our disclaimer: The Reuters name comes up an awful lot when people talk about this topic. Our newswire employs reporters and editors in Bangalore, India, who write and publish financial news about companies in the United States.)