Outsourcing the subs

The ax has fallen on the sub editors (we call 'em copy editors) at Australia's The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald.

They're being outsourced.

Mic Looby recounts some of the announcement by the bosses at parent company Fairfax, including Paul Ramadge, editor-in-chief of The Age:

Effectively removing in-house quality control would not affect the standard of journalism, Mr Ramadge assured us, because all reporters would be instructed to provide “cleaner copy”.

A reporter interrupted the bitter laughter of his colleagues to say there wasn’t a writer in the room who hadn’t been saved at some point by the keen eye and wise counsel of an in-house sub-editor. Others emphasised the importance of collaboration between those who write the news and those who prepare it for publication. In the heat of deadline, reporters and sub-editors need to be able to work together, face-to-face, they said. The bosses nodded and spoke of shared pain.

I've been a reporter, trying to turn in that cleaner copy, and an editor having to handle it. Bitter laughter indeed. Those whom the gods would destroy they first make mad.

Anyone checked, lately, how many journalism schools don't even require editing anymore - this at a time when editing skills clearly are becoming more necessary for more than just editors?

Neil Holdway, treasurer of the American Copy Editors Society, pulled himself away from writhing in laughter at the "cleaner copy" remark (I'm sure), to file a reaction.

It’s not a bad thing to ask reporters to provide “cleaner copy”; we would hope they would want to do that anyway. In fact, we know quite a few conscientious reporters who take the time to review their own copy before filing it. But writing is a complicated thing and the human brain can do only so much at one time. Look what happened at Fox News upon word that Osama bin Laden had been killed: Their graphic — just a simple line of type — read “Obama bin Laden" ...

 Looby holds out the threat that fewer copy editors will mean more defamation suits. I've concluded, however, that with our changing concepts of privacy, people are giving up on such blunt methods as suing (not to mention the cost and time), and in all but the most egregious cases are shrugging it off. I just don't think the threat is as great, and I think executives, who are paid to at least instinctively, if not overtly, make such risk calculations, think the same thing.

Oursourcing copy editing - Pagemasters profile

I won't say the debate about outsourcing or centralizing copy editing has been settled, but for all practical purposes, it is largely a fait accompli in a greater and greater part of the news industry.

Along that line, Sean Ireland has an interesting profile of Pagemasters North America, one of  the best known of the outsourcing services, in a recent edition of the Southern Newspaper Publishers Association eBulletin.

(Pagemasters has branded it "nearsourcing" because, in an obvious shot at services based in India and elsewhere overseas, it is promoting that Pagemasters centers are geographically near groups of clients so the editors are, for instance, well-versed in the English idiom of a region.)

For instance, Stewart Muir, managing director of Pagemasters North America, estimates a third of most newsroom resources to into production that can largely be moved offsite.

It's worth reading.

Singleton - Outsource! Outsource it all, I say!

Dean Singleton, chairman of the AP's board and expert at bleeding newspapers dry, speaks:

MediaNews Group Inc. CEO Dean Singleton, who also serves as chairman of the board of The Associated Press, told the Southern Newspaper Publishers Association that his company was exploring outsourcing in nearly every aspect of their operations.

"In today's world, whether your desk is down the hall or around the world, from a computer standpoint, it doesn't matter," Singleton said after his speech.

MediaNews publishes The Denver Post, The Detroit News and 52 other daily newspapers and is well known for cost-cutting efforts, including combining many operations of its papers near San Francisco.

Singleton said sending copyediting and design jobs overseas may even be called for.

"One thing we're exploring is having one news desk for all of our newspapers in MediaNews ... maybe even offshore," he said during the speech.

(He promises that local editors will still retain control. Would these be the same local editors who already say they are shorthanded and overworked and struggling to keep up?)

More bon mots:

Despite this year's dismal drumbeat of layoffs and revenue drops, Singleton said newspapers still have incredible reach in the country, calling them cornerstones of democracy. But he said they must change in order to survive.

"Fond memories of dead newspapers will do nothing for our communities," he said.

That may be true, Dean, but since many of your papers are dead men walking anyhow, pray tell, what is the difference?

The American Copy Editors Society weighs in with the expected argument about quality, local connections and how some things just can 't be measured in money. And I'm happy it has, but let us know how that line of reasoning works out in this business climate, OK? (As I've written before, such arguments are nice but useless. If you want to make the case that quality = money, you have to do it with the libel insurers, who will have to pay for any screwups. They are the ones who will force companies to internalize such social costs.)

The article also quotes James Macpherson, he of the Pasadenanow.com fame, who has overseas stringers covering his city meetings using webcasts:

"We used to have on-the-ground reporters, but the expense was prohibitive," said James Macpherson, editor and publisher of the site. "Regretfully, we had to lay them all off."

Macpherson said he saw no reason a larger publication couldn't adopt similar techniques to save costs.

"You might miss the nuance of a sneer on a councilman's face but you know how he voted and what he said," he said. "That's factual and can be reported on from anywhere."

Which then raises the question: Since government already has Web sites and webcasts and RSS feeds, why do we need sites like Pasadenanow anyway? Oh yes, we've got to have some space where the pictures don't have any minorities in them.

In all fairness -- one of the rotating main news stories does have Carol Burnett with the artistic director of Pasadena Playhouse, who is black. And there is one of violinist Hagai Shaham with a group of Asian children from the Children's Orchestra. But I've watched the site and finding minorities on it is not particularly common. (Of course, the same might be said for many of Singleton's, and other, newspapers - but I'd suggest that even with their warts they are far more reflective of their communities.)

But not to worry that newspapers are alone. Macpherson's site carries this story about Pasadena's police department automating the filing of police reports for "routine" crimes like theft, vandalism and vehicle burglary. For now, it's a choice -- if you want to file the report online, go ahead. But one wonders how long it will be only an option as cash-strapped cities look at ways to cut costs.

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David Sullivan has a good summary of what copy editors do and their value.

Beyond upheaval

It's really impossible to understate how much fear, loathing, upheaval and [name your basest emotion here] there is in the newspaper business this week.

Last week came the waves of layoffs. Then came the OC Register's outsourcing announcement. And the latest to touch it off was Tampa Trib Exec Editor Janet Coats' meeting announcing upheaval at that newsroom.

Intern Jessica DeSilva's record of that meeting has prompted a long string of comments and reactions. The money quote from Coats that everyone is focusing on:

"People need to stop looking at TBO.com as an add on to The Tampa Tribune,” she said. “The truth is that The Tampa Tribune is an add on to TBO.”

Mindy McAdams and Eric Deggans have more details. Interesting is the new setup outlined on Mindy's blog from an e-mail she got from inside the newsroom:

• Managing editors
• 5-6 audience editors — keep in touch with what the print, TV, online audiences want/need
• 5 sections of reporting (all the reporters for print, TV and Web are mashed up together in these groups):
  1. Deadline — for breaking/daily news
  2. Data — specifically for database stuff
  3. Watchdog — for investigative reporting
  4. Personal journalism — stuff for people’s every day lives like weather, health, entertainment
  5. Grassroots — citizen journalism

Outside of these groups are three “finishing” groups for print, TV and online to determine what stories should be covered and with what medium.

All the reporters will be trained in gathering news for online in case there’s a need for it. They’ll be training them on the go. The focus will now be on immediacy and using mediums appropriately. The print product is going to be more enterprise and in-depth, the Web is for breaking news, etc.

This is a lot like the Atlanta model announced a year ago -- the idea of a core newsgathering operation with specialty groups taking it to each medium. It's what we've been talking about in Newsplex for more than six years. It still will be interesting to see if it works. (One of the posters to DeSilva's piece says that in Atlanta many of the reporters have gone back to tried and true beats. I don't have any independent confirmation of that -- anyone with insight, chime in .)

It's a bit ironic, perhaps, that the Trib and WFLA were one of the original "convergence" hotspots, yet much of that convergence was lip service (I can say that because I have two very good sources who have been deeply embedded in those newsrooms; I've been there at off hours when the suits aren't around and have talked to those doing the work). It has finally taken an economic crisis to force them together (as a result, for instance, all the photographers will have to shoot for all media and will have to reapply for their jobs).

(Update: And not to forget that the L.A. Times said it would cut 250 jobs -- 150 in its newsroom -- while merging print and online (a good result coming out of a bad situation), and the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel launched another surprise round of cuts. Allen Abbey, writing on Poynter's E-Media Tidbits about the L.A. cuts, may have summed it all up best: This is remarkable only in that it is unremarkable.)

There really aren't a lot of deep thoughts here, other than that we are just beginning what will be a long process of readjustment. There will be vitriol and hatred and shouting (online and in person) and pleas to a higher, noble sense of democracy and community - most likely to fall on deaf ears. We are hearing the thunder now because it is happening in the metro markets. We are unlikely to hear the anguish as it seeps ever so certainly down the ranks.

Read the comments on DeSilva's post and on another here if you really want to get a sense of the disconnect -- both generational and of newsrooms from their audiences. Or look at the comments to Timothy Egan's plea at the New York Times to "Save the Press."

Robb Montgomery has a good roundup of all that has been happening.

We are entering the maudlin. "Death of Newspaper" blogs are springing up by the day. Some of the "older" ones on which you can track what's happening: Fading to Black and Newspaper Death Watch. I used to get the RSS feeds, but it depresses me, and besides, with all the traffic floating around, I seem to eventually end up there anyway.

But this is economic reality. It is the same reality many of your neighbors may have had to go through if they worked in autos or steel, on the docks or in the meat processing plants.

Unfortunately, as it always seems, there will be a lot of cruelty in the process.

Bye bye subs - and NPR needs a copy editor

As the outsourcing meme continues ...

Now comes word that London's City AM freesheet has eliminated its sub editors. You can read between the lines, though the owners say it's not a cost-cutting measure but moving "away from a combined editorial and subeditorial model to focus on frontline journalism."

And NPR has an interview today with the CEO of Express KCS, Robert Berkeley, on how he's getting business from U.S. papers. The punch line: "If newspapers don't cut staff, they will lose all their staff."

In a touch of irony, NPR could have used a copy editor on its Web site. It identifies him as CEO of McClatchy.



Here's an earlier interview with Berkeley that has some other details. As journalists --and frankly everyone else in the publishing industry (academic publishers, are you paying attention) -- plop down $625 and find out who your competition is going to be. The company fronting that snippet of interview with Berkeley has a study of the Indian "publishing offshoring" market that says as of 2006 there were 26,000 employees, and it's expected to grow to 74,000 by 2010. I'll bet a copy of that report is in every CEO suite at major U.S. chains.

CJR reports that Express KCS' COO hopes to have 10 to 15 percent of the company's business coming from "editorial" by year's end.

(Of little solace, but if misery loves company, you might also want to check out this report as well on how patent searches, etc., are going offshore. In fact, any labor intensive task that does not require physical presence -- and there are lots of them -- is a target.)

Update: New Zeland also is seeing its share of sub-editing jobs lost as Fairfax centralizes editing. That's prompted a member of Parliament to speak out against it. Jonathan Este, on Crikey, makes a plea to "Save the sub-editor." (Thanks to Pam Robinson for the pointer.)

The cold, hard skinny

I fear I will not be invited to the next Martini Tasting & Poetry Reading committee meeting of the fraternity of copy editors.

This Orange County Register move to outsource some copy editing has the troops riled -- I suspect because in the back of their minds they realize a Rubicon has been crossed, likely never to go back.

Until now, it was one of those things that was dimly distant. Occasionally there would be a small outbreak of such silliness, but some smelling salts and a little brandy, and common sense usually returned.

But this time it might actually be for real. The owners of the Register are known for their ability to squeeze a nickel until it becomes a penny, and, truth be told, if they can make it work others will notice. (And under the radar, Miami is back again, this time planning to outsource the work on its International Edition.)

Reality has hit, and hit hard

Thus has broken out a round of verbal fisticuffs at the Poynter site between Sir Journalists and one Dr. Rajiv Medanki. A consultant in internal medicine, according to his Poynter vita, and one quite learned about the ways of international trade, it seems. A sample:

America is outsourcing copy editing to India for the same reason it outsources computer manufacturing to China and Taiwan: lowered costs and greater profits. Doesn’t every business in America try to maximize these two objectives within the limits of law? Outsourcing of copy editing is legal, and was ironically made possible by a series of media business-friendly free trade agreements that the US and Europe arm-twisted poorer countries into signing. It hurts, doesn’t it, when the best-laid plans have unexpected side effects?

This is not going over well on the American Copy Editors Society's discussion board, prompting me to post this and thus likely becoming uninvited to the annual Reporter Roast and Comma Toss. Oh well. For your consideration:

I've got to give the points in this set to Rajiv.

See, the problem is copy editors are arguing all these fine noble points about "American Journalism." Rajiv is arguing cold, hard business. And he's good at it, and it's not sleight of hand.

We can have all the outrage we want, but the folks pulling our levers could give a damn. Their job is to make the corporation money -- and so is ours. Copy editors don't really "make" the company money. They conserve it by making sure it doesn't have to spend it on things like lawsuits and lost subscribers (we assume here that some folks become so agitated by whatever errors appear that they cancel) and, most important, lost credibility (except no one really knows what that costs). That's a valuable function, but not the raison d'etre of business, which is to expand revenue. (If you don't believe that and you have a 401K or mutual fund with stocks, well, yes you do believe it or you wouldn't be investing in stocks. Steady-state gets killed on the stock market because of the erosion of value.)

Problem is, even our most valuable functions don't translate particularly well into dollars and cents. And that is copy editors' biggest problem -- our costs translate well, our benefits not so much. So when the great accountants in the sky descend, you are a cost center. You can sputter and fume and twirl about in rage all you want. Doesn't make a diff.

You don't like it, go work for a nonprofit. Oh wait, anyone done that recently? I have some acquaintance with it sitting on a nonprofit's committee. And let me tell you, it's every bit as much about cost containment in the NP world these days, if nothing else so that you maximize the dollars going to your causes (and because your largest donors are now focused on a metric they call "efficiency").

Here's the business reality -- businesses will outsource as many copy editors in the coming years as they possibly can as long as the economics favor it. They will handle the "commodity" part of our jobs. Some domestic staff will be retained to review the work of the outsourced and to do those things that require local expertise. A new equilibrium will be found. To think otherwise is to repudiate 150+ years of industrial and economic history.

All the feel-good Web sites we put up won't change that (though maybe they'll give us a little ammo to change a mind or two for a little bit before the inexorable economics kick in). You want to save jobs? Then get some real ammo, the kind with dollar signs attached. And to do that you are going to have to fund studies that show quality and credibility actually make money -- and that's damn hard to do. Just ask Phil Meyer.

"Journalism is different." Agreed. But the companies we work for (or in my case worked, though I still do some freelance and, of course, teach) aren't different. They are creatures of the economic system they exist in. They will not account for all those noble things we talk about unless a) they see it makes money or b) the social costs we trot out are forcibly internalized. And generally you do that only through legal means. Problem is, this First Amendment thingy kind of ties our hands on that. (I have some knowledge of this since part of my grad work was utility regulation, which is all about internalizing social costs.)

If you want your "journalism" to be different, set up your own operation. See if you can find a different way to feed the beast. The "journalism" we love to talk about and the "business of journalism" are two separate things.

Until then, introduce yourself to some former rubber workers, auto workers, steelworkers, Linotype operators and back shop people (Remember them? They were no less "essential," were they?), and dozens of similar groups. Too many journalists are about to join them.

I did make a suggestion on the ACES board that if the organization's leaders are serious about opposing these moves, they may well want to start a rear-guard action by contacting and trying to make their case to the libel and errors & omissions insurers. (Here's one insurer's pitch.) Ultimately, they will be the ones to judge the risk of the venture and thus effectively do any internalization of costs to be done.

The week that was ... moving along the grief stages

Perhaps this last full week of June 2008 just past will be looked back on as the week the final death throes of the newspaper industry began -- 900+ layoffs, copy-editing jobs to India (and more details on an earlier move that have been largely overlooked, a redesign in Orlando that has become the icon -- and lightning rod -- for all manner of writings about a troubled business. (Not to mention a plunging stock market that is likely to make that trouble even greater.)

Earlier, of course, was the debacle the AP made out of issuing DMCA take-down notices to a blogger -- the worst thing for AP being that it no longer is in the background; it now is in the cross-hairs of an enraged digiterati that can make its life hell. (For AP, being rather ham-handed over the years in its public relations, this is not a good thing.) And before that, Gannett's restructuring of its pension plan -- eliminating the defined benefit and "enhancing" its 401(k) matches in company stock (hmmm, checked the stock price lately?).

Seeing the death throes requires, of course, that newspapers must die, and I'm not quite there yet, though I think they (and, again, let's not confuse the newspaper with the newsroom) will exist in radically different frequency and content as we move forward.

But if nothing else, this week seems to mark a leap along the five stages of grief (I think I was one of the first to suggest what was happening in the business could be tracked using the Kubler-Ross model.) It seems we have gone from denial and anger, almost leapfrogged bargaining, and are heading into deep depression.

It's not monolithic, however, and there are vestiges of the bargaining stage. Notable among them is the American Copy Editors Society's new site, whyeditingmatters.org, where everyone is invited to come and post their paeans to the value of good editing. Too little and too late, like much of the industry (Mark Potts, in what may well be called a "Potts-shot," has an evisceration of the industry and what has happened and why in eight quick bullet points), yet at least it is something that may may copy editors (me included) indeed feel better about themselves and their jobs.

The reality, of course, is that a list of praises for editing is going to be about as effective in a boardroom faced with plunging revenues, high debt loads, and a lack of future clarity as those sandbags were atop sodden levees along the Mississippi this week. If the foundation is crumbling, all the other stuff doesn't matter. If ACES wanted to save members' jobs, it needed to begin doing it long before they started rolling to India and in a way that allows them to talk dollars and sense, not feel-goods. It's not too late, but a "tell me your good stories" Web site, while a nice start, is far from the solution.

So much has been written about the throes of this week, I'm going to point you to a few more below. But three things keep floating to the top of my mind:

-- The snark in me tends to want to say it's not necessarily a bad thing that journalists are finding their larder to be stocked with a fair amount of humble pie. A few more franks-and-beans dinners might reconnect us (yes, I include me in the "us") with the reality that many of our readers (or hoped-for readers) are going through. The economic woes in this country are much deeper than you would ever get a sense of by reading most newspapers. And the serious disconnect of many of our largest papers from their communities is being borne out by what is happening in front of us.
-- Having gotten that snarkiness out, I do have some deep fears. Fears for students dedicated to journalism who are among the best and brightest we need, and who are seriously questioning whether law -- or even flipping burgers -- might be a more secure career move. Fear for democracy, too. Not in the "we're just too important to fail" orientation we have heard from too many news organizations and their journalists. But in true concern about what institution will be left with the throw weight to take on government at all levels (and provide some shield for all those involved in journalism - be they full-time professionals or those thrust into the position by the news) in an increasingly legalistic society where he with the most lawyers stands the better chance of winning. (What delicious irony, then, that journalism increasingly seems to be the province of the pre-law major?)
-- We remain too focused on the major metro papers. Cutbacks are happening in smaller newsrooms, too, but mostly in positions unfilled, not the bloodbath we keep reading about. These smaller newsrooms will be no less challenged in the coming decades than are the larger ones now. As our society moves to become digitally mobile, any "local" advantage they may have will be diluted -- yet with a few exceptions many of these newsrooms lack the technical and financial wherewithal (as you will see if you spend much time clicking around their Web sites, if you can find them at all). And let's not forget that the vast majority of newsrooms in this nation are in small communities. (And even some of those community papers with big-pocket parents are having a bad year.)

Having said all that, let me point you to some other readings with useful perspectives on this week:

• David Sulivan: You could do worse than continue to check on David's insightful posts. His take on the carnage is that newspapers have a role, but in the headlong rush to the digital exits we're not figuring out what that role is so that we can sustan it. And he's back later in the week with one of his great comparisons between newspapers and department stores. In this one, looking at the Orlando redesign, he takes on that delicate balance between innovative change and just angering your customers. (I identify; my local paper loves to jump stories to separate parts of the "A" section, which just screams "it's convenient for us, but the heck with you." Unfortunately, the Internet lets the customers scream back.)
• Philip M. Stone: David points to one of Stone's articles on Follow the Media* in which Stone's 30-something son buys the Orlando paper at his father's request and issues this withering assessment: My generation, as well as future generations, will be able to access information literally on demand, in full color, and then be able to, just as easily, get as many different viewpoints on that in a span of minutes. How on earth does a newspaper, printed hours before, compete with that?

  “Today’s society is not one that relies on their city paper to educate them on what happened yesterday; we are a generation that insists upon immediate and detailed media that allows us to know news as it is happening. It is for these reasons that the Sentinel, and papers everywhere, can give themselves all the makeovers they wish to give, but at the end of the day the makeover will suffer the same result as the content within it -- it will be old news.”

  Stone also has a good roundup of some of the other industry business decisions that didn't get quite the coverage but are no less telling.
• Fding to Black, one of the new blogs covering the industry demise, has some other, lesser-reported layoffs.
  

(*FTM, by the way, has become one of my favorite media sites.)

More moves to overseas

When the Miami Herald's story about the McClatchy cutbacks came out last week, I didn't see this initially.

About 40 newsroom personnel are slated to take voluntary buyouts or be laid off.

Those include 12 newsroom supervisors, five in the International Edition, two copy editors, three reporters, four designers and layout specialists, two on the state desk, two critics, two photographers and six in archiving and calendar.

Archiving, calendar and the International Edition will be outsourced to workers in India. The company is also exploring transferring its radio operations to a third-party company, but the services to public radio station WLRN will remain the same.

Interesting the mix of jobs going to India. Someone correct me if I'm wrong, but it sounds as though those International Edition positions were largely repackaging/process, the kind of jobs ripe for outsourcing. Still, it's another breach in the wall. Given that some execs have expressed views of copyeditors as not much more than comma processors ...

Liz Donovan, the former Herald librarian behind Infomaniac has more observations, and she points to a good post by Derek Willis on the future of news libraries, an often overlooked but important part of all this in a digital age.

Copy Editing: OC Register to ship it overseas?

Media Bistro reports that the Orange County Register is getting ready to send copy-editing work to India. A commenter on the blog and some early word on the ACES discussion board suggests it may not be just some weekly work but some daily as well.

We'll see if this decision sticks after some others, including Miami, have backed down.

Stay tuned ...

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June 25 Update

The AP reports the Register has hired Mindworks to lay out one of the OCR's community papers and to do copy editing of some stories in the main Register. LA Observed says the commuity paper is likely to be the one in San Clemente:

The story is that, when many of the Register's weeklies switch to three days a week, the Indian rent-an-editors will avoid the hiring of new copy editors who just have to be laid off if the Register continues to tank.

Meanwhile, nary a peep from the American Copy Editors Society leadership, though this has been in the works for at least a week (the initial publication of this entry). Maybe they're busy organizing that Indian chapter? Truth be told, there's damn little ACES can do other than keep writing letters to the editor trying to lift copy editors' veil of anonymity. Maybe that'll at least help them get a job elsewhere.

You've gotta love Mindworks' slogan, though: "Enabling media transformation." As Leno would say, the first slogan was rejected: "Helping your ass out the door."

Copy-editing jobs

While I was gone, a couple of developments on the future of copy-editing jobs beat:

• The Allentown Morning Call announced a major restructuring, including further conversion to a universal desk that will also, as I read the memo, have greater responsibilities for posting online. The paper also hopes to install a Tansa spelling- and usage-check system. Tansa is a system sold as several steps above spellcheck, allowing more customization and looking at copy in context to detect problems.
  
• The key point from publisher Ardith Hilliard's memo: Tansa would save editing time for the copy desk, allowing us to more effectively operate a universal desk with fewer editors.
• That brought a quick response from Lucas Grindley: Picture a world rife with budget cuts that obliterate the copy desk by replacing people with computers, and leaving the "hard stuff" for desk editors. (Grindley is operations manager at the Sarasota Herald-Tribune.)
  
• Tansa President Robert Lanzio quickly responded on Grindley's blog that Tansa has not been "the direct cause of any job losses in the USA." Grindley countered: Regardless of whether you all built Tansa to replace copy editors, don't you agree that if a large copy desk becomes more efficient, then it could be reduced in size?" Leaving Lanzio with the tepid response: " To date, the statement I made is true."

Tansa was discussed back on this blog in November 2005. At the time, those commenting said it was not that great at detecting even some of the harder language problems. I don't know whether it has been improved since then. The danger here is that copy editor jobs are too easily equated with spell-check. If the system really is used to free them from routine so that they can look more closely at the substance of stories in the context of the reader, great.

But the reality may be instead that as copy desks are reduced, line editors are given more of this responsibility. Bad move. Line eds are too busy already. They also are too invested in the stories -- and I want them to be, because they need to be effective salesmen and saleswomen for their reporters. But that makes them exactly the wrong people to stand in for the readers.

As my friend Brian Murley commented on Grindley's blog: Tansa is more likely the victim of the law of unintended consequences. Still, it's easy to see how it could become the "indirect" cause of the loss of copy editing jobs. Heck, if people seem willing to ship such jobs to India, why wouldn't a software system help them achieve that goal?

(The Call also is eliminating a news librarian, another step in a sad trend.)

• The Miami Herald had a dalliance with outsourcing design and editing of a neighborhood section to India. Fortunately, cooler heads and common sense prevailed. As Executive Editor Anders Gyllenhaal wrote: "The more we looked at the prospects of editing and layout from outside the newsroom, the more it was clear these skills involving news judgment and experience are not likely to work well from afar." However, ad production and monitoring of Web site comments will continue from overseas.
  

Distant Copy-Editing Dangers

With all the talk recently about outsourcing and consolidating copy desks (just follow the labels at the end of this post for more), here comes a real-world example of how bad it can be.

Grade the News has a lengthy story/interview with John Bowman, an editor at one of the Media News Group's papers that now dominate the San Francisco Bay Area. Media News has consolidated its copy editing in Pleasanton. Som excerpts:

"Copy desks are so thinly staffed that they are making an incredible number of errors," says Mr. Bowman. "These errors are in the headlines and [photo] cutlines so they are glaring."

"They are the kind of errors that destroy our credibility," he complains.

He showed the front page of the April 23 Times. The centerpiece story was about an event in Pacifica, but the headline placed it miles south, in Half Moon Bay. On the same front page a story about the salary gap between men and women claimed to continue on page 6, but copy editors forgot to put the rest of the story in the paper. The day before, the local front page contained a story about a San Mateo County Board of Supervisors meeting, but the headline attributed the action to Redwood City.

"These mistakes are not made by reporters and editors," he fumes, "but every member of the public thinks we don't know the difference between Pacifica and Half Moon Bay."

And from another anonymous journalist in the story:

Errors made by the centralized copy editing desk, the journalist complains, are routine, sometimes even comic. "One day there was a blank space on the front page where a photo was supposed to go. What concerned me was that there was no noticeable alarm that this had occurred. There's no connection to the community, so why be embarrassed by anything?

This is the response from Kevin Keane, the editor in charge of most of Media News' Bay Area papers:

To the charge that the centralized copy desk makes frequent errors, Mr. Keane says, "There's no question that the one copydesk has had some problems, but it's a solid operation."

The optimum solution, he says, is the traditional one with the copy desk in the same newsroom with reporters and other editors. But, he adds, "We're just not in a position to function like that."

MediaNews is moving toward a centralized copy desk next year that will serve all of its papers in the region, he explains, including the Mercury News. When pressed as to why each paper couldn't retain its copy editors, he responds, "We're just not."

Read more. Worry greatly. That last line about the Merc may take more than a few people by surprise (or not, given what's happening).

These sorts of things come about because the owners view the paper as a "product," not a service. A product orientation tends to be one that minimizes the economic principle of substitution -- it views consumers as those who cannot as easily do without what is being sold. A service orientation understands that things are very fungible and easily replaced.

I think some editing operations can and will be centralized, but there still has to be someone back in the community as a final touchstone.

About outsourcing

It's funny, sometimes, how we get all worked up about outsourcing, like the Pasadena site thinking about having its City Council meetings covered from India, and we miss a bigger and better story that came earlier.

At least this column by Maria Trombly about how she's working the whole outsourcing biz to produce financial coverage from China didn't get the same kind of publicity.

Read it. It's so much more informative than the kind of screechy reactions to the Pasadena story. Trombly has some really good insights about how it all works.

Mumbai calling ...

Well, the other shoe has dropped. A news outlet has decided to outsource coverage of its local city government - to India.

PasadenaNow Editor and Publisher James MacPherson says it's easy to oursource now that city council meetings are broadcast on the Internet. Quoting the AP story: "I think it could be a significant way to increase the quality of journalism on the local level without the expense that is a major problem for local publications," said the 51-year-old Pasadena native. "Whether you're at a desk in Pasadena or a desk in Mumbai, you're still just a phone call or e-mail away from the interview."

He's hired a couple of Indian journalists for a projected annual cost of $20,800.

There is the predictable criticism. And I can't say I'm a big fan of the idea -- especially as MacPherson is executing it, which I suspect does not include actually having a local reporter available to dig into the deeper stuff.

But on a more abstract level, I don't totally condemn the concept. We have too many high-value journalists doing too much scut work. If that kind of mindless transcription stuff (and that includes the standard mindless meeting story I read too often) can be outsourced, good. But only if that frees up resources for local reporters to actually dig behind the scenes. The overall result might be fewer reporters, but if the ones that remain are used to the best of their training and abilities, then there might be some benefit.

Sadly, as noted here before, I think too many publishers will take the Pasadena Now route. The stories from India were supposed to start appearing today. Is it Freudian that the first one -- about the city's arts director resigning -- was a blank?

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Alan Mutter, the Newsosaur, has his usually good overview of such subjects.
Over at Lost Remore, Liz Foreman has a post on how soon it will be before broadcasters start outsourcing:

• It’ll go from no one does it to everyone does it.


• It’ll go from “we don’t know who to hook up with” to every consultantcy has an Indian firm they do business with and I bet these firms start showing up at RTNDA/NAB in a year or so.

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More:
Read the comments at Freakonomics. Not a lot of shoulders to cry on there.

Sobering thoughts for copy editors

The upheaval at Britain's Telegraph Group brings some sobering thoughts for copy editors -- or subs (for sub-editor) as they are known across the pond. One wonders when we will start to see the same thing here. Telegraph Chief Executive Murdoch MacLennan wrote to his executives:

Some aspects of our news operation have not altered significantly in decades. The digital revolution is rapidly making them obsolete. When we move, we must take the opportunity to do things differently, particularly in the way we produce our content.

As we have recently seen at the FT, integration of print and on-line inevitably provides considerable scope for reducing duplication of effort and for simplifying the editorial production process. As a result, resources can be released which will allow us to develop the business in a way which keeps us ahead of the pack.

The Guardian's Roy Greenslade chews on that a bit and concludes that the days of the sub-editor may be numbered.

I'm not yet quite certain what those "practices" might be, but I'd guess that he means production and that means, of course, waving farewell to sub-editors.As a long-time newspaper sub of yesteryear, and therefore deeply appreciative of all that subs do and have done, I lament their passing. But it's plain, and getting plainer all the time, that this revolution is allowing reporters and writers to speak directly and instantaneously to readers and online users. There is less need for the middle man (and woman), though I'd guess that many a sub-editor who has laboured over a reporter's tortured prose, sloppy fact-checking and poor spelling will disagree. In truth, though, all journalists in future will need to have all those skills. Hundreds of thousands of bloggers post perfectly readable copy hour by hour without the need for anyone to write a snappy headline or insert a semi-colon. They are the future, and both their input and output, seen in purely commercial terms, is cheap.

As witnessed at ths year's ACES convention, copy editors are already a nervous lot -- too often not sure where this particularly enshrined "print" skill (though no less needed in broadcast and online if one looks at the output of those media) is headed. This can't help.

They can take a little solace, maybe, in the comments to Greenslade's column that are largely supportive of the job they do without being shrill about how the world might end without copy editors (it won't).

But they also will have to listen to what MacLennan is saying: As big as the challenges are, there are unparalleled opportunities, too. In a multi-media world, strong brands will flourish.

Copy editors need to start promoting their "brand" a lot more heavily and what they can bring to any publication. Too often, however, they revel in their anonymity. That will not serve them well. Likewise, sticklers for standards and consistency as we in the copy-edting business are, I fear that midset sloshes over into an overall reluctance to change. Oh, change on a desk happens, but if you've ever looked carefully, too often it is tepid at best (more charitable folks would use the word "deliberate.") Copy editors are likely to find their jobs changing radically in the next decade, yet their core principles need not, and should not. To survive, they must be able to distinguish the two and accommodate those changes while promoting themselves as a value proposition, not a cost center.

Pam Robinson highlighted some of the fears with one of her recent blog posts about how Indian companies specializing in outsourced jobs are bulking up in the editing and media areas. Yes, it's probably going to happen, I said in an e-mail

I suspect we will see some other work go to the subcontinent, and you know what I think it might be first -- design! Design does not need context to operate (witness many of the newspapers we now see and how, as copy editors, we have to shoehorn things into design for design's sake). If I give you a story budget and order and the specs for my publication, design work can be done anywhere, with maybe one or two domestically to handle deadlines and touch up anything you've screwed up.

Producing briefs -- yep, that can probably go overseas, too. In fact, I've said that were I starting a paper, I'd find a computer program to take any press releases that needed briefing and have the program write them. (I want my reporters out on the street, not processing copy.) However, nothing would see the Web or my paper without going through an editor.

Of more concern, I think, are things like Scripps' consolidated desk for three or four of its Florida papers. I think Media General has (or has considered) a couple of those, too. As we get more clustering (McClatchy, for instance, now owns six papers in South Carolina, if you include Charlotte's substantial circ. in the northern part), we're going to see more of that, and that will be the danger for copy eds.

Oh, I think some publisher will try to outsource copy editing at some point, but similar things have been tried before, and the results are almost uniformly bad because the person has no local context to spot those errors that don't come from a dictionary or stylebook. (As an example, though imperfect, back in the '80s, UPI was having all its state broadcast copy produced and edited at three or four regional hubs. That ended after lots of errors crept in.)

One other thing -- expect to see papers drop more full-time staff and go to contract temps for editing. They might for reporting, too, but I expect it more for editing. The reason: The copy desk is like a utility -- it has to be ready to supply power at peak times, but that means there are times it is staffed too heavily (say 4 p.m. when there's relatively little copy in queue -- or whatever the slow time is at your shop). So if my "peak" period is from 7-10, let's say, why do I hire a person for eight hours? I hire just enough full time to cover those slow periods, then bring in the contract workers for the peaks. (Oh, and I don't have to pay them benes, either.) I'm not saying I like it; I'm just analyzing it from the business perspective.

That note about consolidated desks took on some new meaning with rumors later circulating that Tribune was looking at combining desks. Supposedly, that has cooled for now, but the idea of consolidating design still apparently has legs in the company. As the New York Times' post-mortem on Knight Ridder noted, combining copy desks was one of the options considered in that company's final throes ("Knight Ridder also suggested that copy-editing functions could be consolidated, even among far-flung papers.")

So expect to read more -- a lot more -- about this in the next year or two. I predict ACES conventions will not be the most upbeat of gatherings for a while unless and until copy editors do a lot more to assert their value, but in a way that recognizes and incorporates new media realities along with old media sensibilities.

(Updating):
And I forgot to note that the Baltimore and Washington Examiners are laid out and paginated from a central desk in Alexandra, Va.