The Latest Nail In Newspapers' Coffin: Outsourcing

The newspaper business has been struggling to reinvent itself to compete. Now the Orange County Register is trying a new way to cut costs: outsourcing to India.

Mindworks Global Media will copy edit some of the papers' stories for a one-month trial starting next week. And a community newspaper owned by the O.C. Register's parent company--it didn't name which one--will outsource page layout to Mindworks, which is based outside New Delhi.

This isn't enabling any layoffs--not yet. The company insists it's just a test, and it won't affect reporting or decision making and that O.C.-based editors will continue to oversee the month. Orange County Register Communications has been suffering through a rough patch. As its circulation tumbled, dropping the company from being California's third largest paper to its fifth largest, the company has done three rounds of layoffs in the past year.

So what does this test bode for the ailing business? (See my analysis of the newspaper industry's struggles here.) Is this a way to cut significant costs? Or does it undermine the very spirit of a regional paper to send copyediting duties to India? Having worked in journalism, I can attest that copyeditors do a lot more than spell checking; they also take on syntax and grammatical issues, thinking about local idioms and sayings.

Is that outsourcable? Chief copyeditors at places like the New York Times and the New Yorker are revered. If that part of the newsroom is sent overseas, what's next, reporting? Or is this the kind of cost cutting that the business needs?

Comments

[Mike Maisel]

How can it make sense to make cuts that will directly impact the product, potentially weakening it? So many papers are making just these kinds of cuts now, and these will only serve to lock them into a death sprial. If readers are deserting you because they find other media more suitable, the better course would seem to be to remake your product tailored to evolving media consumption tastes, but not to poke more holes in the already leaky boat.

In announcing personnel cuts of 22% (Web editorial staff was not part of this, by the way), Editor Cliff Teutsch told staff the cuts "add a sober reality for all as we continue to remake the paper for a September launch." See the key words there, "remake the paper."

Maybe it's just spin, but remaking your product to be more relevant, more accessible, more user-friendly just makes a lot more sense than commoditizing it by outsourcing core journalism functions or dictating arbitrary editorial to advertising ratios. Or maybe, I'm just too much a fan of literacy.

[Bean Counter]

The Wall Street Journal has long "outsourced" copy editing and layout of it's European and Asian editions to South Brunswick, New Jersey. There was a lot of hand wringing at first as to whether people in NJ would get right the details of local European or Asian stories, given their presumed lack of knowledge of the regions and key players. Has it worked out - you can never tell because you can't tell how the papers would have done without the change. But you can tell that that the costs cuts were achieved. It takes vision to put the unprovable gains of quality against provable cost cuts. That type of vision is now very rare in the newspaper industry.