As newspapers seek to cut costs in the face of sagging circulation and advertising pressures, some have started to ship jobs overseas to places like India. "More than two years ago, Reuters, the financial news service, opened a new center in Bangalore," reports Doreen Carvajal. "The 340 employees, including an editorial team of 13 local journalists, was deployed to write about corporate earnings and broker research on U.S. companies. Since then, the Reuters staff at the center has grown to about 1,600, with 100 journalists working on U.S. stories." Other publications are using the services of Hi-Tech Export, an Indian company with some 700 employees that offers proofreading, copy-editing and writing services to companies in the United States, France and Britain.

"Walmart used to annoy me with its horrible labor practices, draconian rules, and blatant manipulation of the media, but now it's gone past annoyance to bafflement," writes marketing consultant K.D. Paine. "The latest was the firing of their VP of Marketing because she allegedly went for rides in an Aston Martin and accepted dinners from Agencies pitching their business. ... Their message is: we're all about ethics. Which might be believable for a nanosecond, except that the agency behind the biggest ethics scandal to hit the blogosphere in awhile (and presumably the PR person who okay-ed those fake blogs) are still happily employed." Michael Deaver, a former chief of staff for President Reagan, is now helping to oversee the Wal-Mart account as a vice chairman at the Edelman PR firm.