Jimbo
TonyKIt's in the morning tabloid, so it must be right. Right?
October 17th 2006 06:28
Well, hardly.
Last week readers of Sydney's Daily Telegraph and Melbourne's Herald Sun awoke to a front-page "expose" detailing how that icon of Australian banking, the ANZ, was exporting call centres to India.
Now, when you phone to query a balance from Newcastle or Emu Plains, a resident of Bangalore would check your details and read them back in an accent perfected in intensive training sessions.
And there, on the same front page, was a photo of the building they worked from.
Except it WASN'T a call centre. It was an ANZ IT nerve centre (others are in Australia). None of the Bangalore workers take inbound calls from Australian customers.
Now, our fellow media monitor Media Watch (ABC-TV, Monday 9.15pm) has correctly pointed to the magnitude of this mistake. On the front-pages of the two biggest-circulating daily newspapers (which both delight in boasting and often exaggerating) this was the biggest mistake senior print journalists can remember. Perhaps - because of the prominence chosen for the story - the biggest in Australian publishing history.
The bank has pulled all advertsing from News Ltd., which publishes both papers, but the damage lingers.
Media Blotch has a friend who works in the ANZ's Melbourne call centre and she and her colleagues are still receiving abuse from customers. Often they end a call with a sarcastic inquiry about the weather in soujthern India!
Stand by for the biggest damages claim ever launched against a publisher in Australia (we almost said Australian publisher, but we all know Rupert's citizenship status.)
But the fallout from such an appalling inability to assemble the facts (didn't anyone in the Sydney or Melbourne newsrooms think of checking with the bank?) spreads so much wider. Much wider.
Most adults who don't share the morning newspaper habit rely on radio for news. And so many AM and FM radio news "services" rely heavily on the morning newspapers for content.
A quick turn of the dial in Melbourne on the morning this "non-story" hit the front pages in huge headlines confirmed this. At least five stations in news bulletins (monitored betweeen 6 and 9am) referred to the "shocking" revelations of the "call centre jobs lost to India." In at least two instances, this "news" was simply a direct live "read" from the paper.
This is simply inexcusable, of course. Any radio newsroom which depends on a morning tabloid with an ever-decreasing credibility as its staple source deserves to share a place on the defendant's table.
As we said, stand by for more in this dark chapter. And will you believe what you read tomorrow morning?
Last week readers of Sydney's Daily Telegraph and Melbourne's Herald Sun awoke to a front-page "expose" detailing how that icon of Australian banking, the ANZ, was exporting call centres to India.
Now, when you phone to query a balance from Newcastle or Emu Plains, a resident of Bangalore would check your details and read them back in an accent perfected in intensive training sessions.
And there, on the same front page, was a photo of the building they worked from.
Except it WASN'T a call centre. It was an ANZ IT nerve centre (others are in Australia). None of the Bangalore workers take inbound calls from Australian customers.
The bank has pulled all advertsing from News Ltd., which publishes both papers, but the damage lingers.
Media Blotch has a friend who works in the ANZ's Melbourne call centre and she and her colleagues are still receiving abuse from customers. Often they end a call with a sarcastic inquiry about the weather in soujthern India!
Stand by for the biggest damages claim ever launched against a publisher in Australia (we almost said Australian publisher, but we all know Rupert's citizenship status.)
But the fallout from such an appalling inability to assemble the facts (didn't anyone in the Sydney or Melbourne newsrooms think of checking with the bank?) spreads so much wider. Much wider.
A quick turn of the dial in Melbourne on the morning this "non-story" hit the front pages in huge headlines confirmed this. At least five stations in news bulletins (monitored betweeen 6 and 9am) referred to the "shocking" revelations of the "call centre jobs lost to India." In at least two instances, this "news" was simply a direct live "read" from the paper.
This is simply inexcusable, of course. Any radio newsroom which depends on a morning tabloid with an ever-decreasing credibility as its staple source deserves to share a place on the defendant's table.
As we said, stand by for more in this dark chapter. And will you believe what you read tomorrow morning?
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