As the alleged scourge of American journalism, James Macpherson cuts a rather disappointing figure.
In a crisp blue blazer, with slicked-back gray hair, the onetime garment manufacturer looks like a prep school headmaster. He speaks with the polite self-control of PBS' Jim Lehrer.
Macpherson drew headlines and hate mail last year when it was revealed that his Pasadena Now website intended to report the news from Pasadena using writers in Mumbai and Bangalore, India.
Outrage surged again a week ago, when Maureen Dowd of the New York Times reported on her visit with Macpherson, who told her that newspapers are in "a General Motors moment" and that his website could become a prototype for the future.
This might all seem terribly threatening to a knuckle-walking, retrograde print reporter like me, if I hadn't spent a little time with the Internet publisher and taken a spin through Pasadena Now.
What I found was a small businessman struggling to make a dollar, and a bright, glossy website mostly preoccupied with society happenings, ribbon-cuttings, fundraisers, the arts and, one day this week, gingerbread houses made by local schoolchildren.
I'm as sour on the idea of outsourcing journalism to the subcontinent as the next ink-stained wretch. Too many of my colleagues, at The Times and other papers, have already been pushed out the door.
But the natty and articulate Mr. Macpherson will not be the end of us. His 4-year-old website may one day thrive and find the magic bullet -- how to make money on a news site -- that has eluded virtually every other publisher.
That will not diminish the desire of many thinking people to have a more probing view of the communities they live in. And I still see no alternative for providing that information other than an eyewitness, on the ground, asking questions.
Newspapers and their websites -- even in a diminished state -- still tell those stories most, and best. That's why the movers at Pasadena City Hall and the school district make sure they read the Pasadena Star News and the alternative Pasadena Weekly.
They might peek at Macpherson's Pasadena Now on occasion. Staffers for the city and school district say they like the way the website faithfully publishes their press releases. "But when it takes the time and resources and energy to do something much more in-depth, they don't have the capacity to do as much of that," said Binti Harvey, spokeswoman for Pasadena Unified School District.
