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Delhi might be the future office for editorial production for Australian newspapers. It is here that Mindworks Global Media services is situated which is looking at various editorial outsourcing to Places like Australia, British and Southeast Asia.
Mindworks Global Media services have been successful despite a humble infrastructure. It has won a contract to handle editorial production in sport and business for one of Asia's top English-speaking newspapers, Hong Kong's South China Morning Post, among other Asian newspapers. It would dearly like to add an Australian title to its portfolio.
But the outsourcing of editorial production is a delicate issue in Australian journalism. Just how delicate became clear last week when APN News and Media unveiled plans to outsource most of the editorial of its New Zealand newspapers.
Under the proposal, The New Zealand Herald, along with a host of other APN newspapers, will outsource up to 70 sub-editing jobs to the Melbourne-headquartered Pagemasters, an AAP subsidiary. Pagemasters would set up its own NZ editorial production operation. Pagemasters already packages sports, national and world news pages for APN papers in NSW and Queensland.
The outsourcing proposal would be most keenly felt at APN's NZ flagship. Confidential documents and information obtained by Media reveal Pagemasters would handle the vast bulk of production at the NZ Herald. The documents show that half of the 12 remaining production staff (there are presently 42) would be involved purely with design.
One internal NZ Herald source commented: "They're retaining two features sub-editors, and one news sub-editor, and that's it. That is the structure they've given us at the moment."
It is understood that while layout of the first nine pages of the paper would remain in-house, Pagemasters will almost entirely handle text subbing. A similar fate is likely to await the sports and business sections of the paper.
A further concern is the quality of what will be produced by a third party not in the same location as a newspaper's reporters or in-house production staff. The experiment with cost cutting through Indian outsourcing has had patchy results.
How profitable these outsourced operations become in journalism is yet to be known, but a enthusiast Mindworks are determined that it will continue to knock on the door of Australian papers.
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