OC Register To Try Outsourcing Some Editing Work To India
Posted by: Jubal | 06/25/2008 12:25 PM
Several friends e-mail me this AP story:
An Indian company will take over copy editing duties for some stories published in The Orange County Register and will handle page layout for a community newspaper at the company that owns the Pulitzer Prize-winning daily, the newspaper confirmed Tuesday.
This really shouldn't come as a surprise. The Register's circulation has been in a steep decline, and every media outlet is struggling to to cut costs in the face of increased competition from online media.
And if the Reg can obtain the same service at a lower cost by outsourcing to India, then why not?
An Indian company will take over copy editing duties for some stories published in The Orange County Register and will handle page layout for a community newspaper at the company that owns the Pulitzer Prize-winning daily, the newspaper confirmed Tuesday.
Orange County Register Communications Inc. will begin a one-month trial with Mindworks Global Media at the end of June, said John Fabris, a deputy editor at the Register.You can read the rest of the article here, and it bears noting this story first surfaced in the OC Weekly, which delights in tormenting the OCR.
Mindworks' Web site says the company is based outside New Delhi and provides "high-quality editorial and design services to global media firms ... using top-end journalistic and design talent in India."
Editors at Mindworks will work five shifts a week for one month, performing layout for the community paper and editing some stories in the flagship Register, Fabris said. Staffing at the company will not be affected, he said.
Fabris did not specify which community newspaper would be laid out by Indian designers.
This really shouldn't come as a surprise. The Register's circulation has been in a steep decline, and every media outlet is struggling to to cut costs in the face of increased competition from online media.
And if the Reg can obtain the same service at a lower cost by outsourcing to India, then why not?
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Mr. Ayer registered as a Republican to be electable in an interim election with no incumbents. He did...
By the time all these newspapers figure out how to stop losing money and start making it, they will be out of business.
There is a cost-benefit associated with outsourcing. Then there are the various risk factors. The top five according to Iacovou and Nakatsu are:
1. Lack of top management involvement
2. Requirement miscommunication
3. Language barriers - as in what’s up dude?
4. Inadequate user involvement
5. Lack of know-how
We have never found a high-level manager who did not think his or her respective off-shore initiative was not going to be an unqualified success – mostly because of the ego involved.
In this industry (OCR’s and LA Times’ for example), however, we posit that it is not the labor cost associated with the product, as much as the right product for the right time.
Ha ...
The media propaganda machine supports outsourcing of everyone else's jobs - name-calling/ branding Patriots who support American Jobs & "America First" as "isolationists."
Mind-numbing idiocy & short-sighted Wall Street greed.
"Reporters" next?
ps. cudos to the OC Weekly!
imo
Any chance they'd outsource the editorial staff? :-)
This move can only improve the grammatical accuracy of the articles. The Register is not known for their ability to use spell check.
This is a bit scary. What industry is next?
Public safety – as in the OCSD and partly because of the 3%-50 issue
…and any industry too arrogant and stubborn to read tea leaves. This forum and others like it, for example, are one reason the LA Times and the OCR are bleeding.
We warned the US auto industry over 30 years ago that the industry’s incestuous relationship with the union would lead to unsustainable cost structures. As recently as five years ago, we were ridiculed because of “superior management and designs being put out by the US”, we were told. Then they pointed out to Harley-Davidson motorcycle inroads as an example.
Be warned, you pay dead wood to do a job, without concern for the service the end user wants and ist associated costs to deliver it, and you become irrelevant, faster than a kid takes to hack into a computer and change his grades!
Discussion in this thread is exhibit A, in support of the argument that public safety will soon follow the way of the OCR ---outsource to counterbalance the accumulation of dead wood.