Note: Originally published Jan. 16, 2008, by CNHI News Service.

By William B. Ketter
CNHI News Service

It may be inevitable in the transformational world that newspapers find themselves facing today. Still, it is shocking to know the Bengal tiger’s nose is now under the newsroom door.

No less a newspaper than the mighty Miami Herald, winner of 19 Pulitzer Prizes, has acknowledged it considered outsourcing newsroom duties to India in order to save money.

It rejected the idea. Yet the mere thought of such a respected paper farming out local journalism to a distant land had to send chills through newsrooms across the country.

And what did the poohbahs at the Miami Herald consider might get done as well – and cheaper – 8,500 miles from southern Florida?

Copyediting of the paper’s community section – you know, those weekly little news listings and stories about births, reunions, community services, volunteer programs, Little League tryouts.
And design tasks associated with the section.

For the uninitiated, copyediting involves, among other things, checking stories for style, spelling, grammatical glitches, punctuation, taste, clarity and accuracy. You need to know your Strunk and White as well as local names and locations.

Design duties are more technical. They involve twisting and turning images and text on a computer screen to build newspaper pages that inform and attract readers. A sense of place is important to putting out content that connects. It could be a stretch for designers sitting in New Delhi.

The notion of shipping work from U.S. newspapers to India, where educated labor is a fraction of the cost, is obviously gaining momentum. Thus far it has been limited to phone banks, technical support centers and the production of prescribed advertising content.

Newsrooms have been considered off limits because of the local knowledge and critical judgment journalists need to sort through the news and decide what’s important and what’s not. Initiative, enterprise and creativity are valued.

Bombay and Bangalore doubtless have lots of skilled English speakers. Northwestern University in Evanston, Ill., is even considering starting a journalism school in India. But the reasoning has been that when it comes to gathering and producing local news, you need to know your audience and be on the scene of the news to get it right.

Granted, there are some news pages that are formulaic. Content is culled from press releases and emails sent by clubs, churches, schools and other organizations, then typeset into columns of gray.

It is true that not one of these items by itself constitutes news in the sense that very many people are interested in it. Taken together, however, these nuggets of information offer a sense of the diversity and continuity of community life – something it would seem impossible to understand or feel from a foreign perch halfway around the world.

What’s more, this little news is gaining currency for newspapers as they struggle to publish original content that will retain and gain readers. Thus it would seem the kind of news they want to protect and enrich rather than send to India for processing.

Wrenching revenue declines, however, have turned the focus on costs.

And metropolitan newspapers, such as the Miami Herald, are more vulnerable than community papers to the lure of reducing the expense of publishing little news through outsourcing.

Why?

It is far more expensive for them to copyedit and design community sections. Newsroom salaries are two and three times that of small papers and often the big city journalists themselves prefer to work on other, more important stories.

So far, only the Miami Herald has publicly stated it studied the idea of outsourcing some newsroom functions to a company called Mindworks of New Delhi. Others are also likely thinking about it or they are being solicited by companies that promise a cheaper alternative in the face of financial challenges.

Dave Wilson, The Herald’s managing editor for news, said the more his paper studied the outsourcing idea, “the more we tried to see how the editorial part of it would function, the more obstacles there appeared to be.”

Executive Editor Anders Gyllehaal, in a staff memo, was more definite. His study deemed the idea inappropriate. “It won’t be tested,” he said. “Nor will other newsroom editing and design like it.”

Journalists can cheer that conclusion. So should readers.

William B. Ketter is vice president of news for Community Newspaper Holdings Inc.

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