Ever heard of companies like Mindworks Global Media, Express KCS, or Affinity Express? Well, in due course, millions of English speaking newspapers will do. Now, this concerns “only” readers of newspapers such as the San Jose Mercury News, The Miami Herald, or the Orange Country Register, to name just a few. In these newspapers, significant editorial jobs, tasks that once belonged to US newsrooms are now outsourced to a cluster of companies in India.
This is the next effect of globalization: off-shored editorial jobs. Highly specialized sweatshops, hundreds of workers on night shifts — Indian time zone — line up in the outskirts of Delhi or Mumbai. Journalists are no longer only reporting or analyzing job migration to cheaper Asia, they are now about to experience it. Take the Orange County Register for instance. Typical big regional American newspaper: strong power in its own terrotory (the greater South of Los Angeles), several Pulitzer Prizes, and recently about a hundred layoffs in its newsroom. Last month, it became the latest to offshore not only secondary jobs such as laying out ads, but also core competencies such as copyediting. It relies on Mindworks Global Media, a two-year-old company headquartered in Noida, 15 miles from New Delhi where ninety qualified Indians are performing the task (see story in Business Week ). The OC Register features the most advanced example of outsourcing jobs in the print media. Other newspapers such as the San Jose Mercury News (Silicon Valley’s daily), or the Oakland Tribune are testing the waters: they assign advertising layouts to Express KCS a two hundred people startup based in Gurgaon, India, also close to New Delhi. Express KSC provides a wide range of print related services, ranging from pre-press to magazine production or ad design work (story in the Columbia Journalism Review )
Three factors accelerate the trend. The first one is the newspaper sector’s global crisis. English speaking ones are motivated to outsource to India (or Thailand which is eyeing the pie) as much work as they reasonably can: most of the of day-to-day layout jobs will soon be gone, as well as a greater number of sub-editing, copy-proofing positions. When the cost ratio is 2:1 or even 3:1 as it is between US (or UK) and India, the incentive is impossible to resist.
Increasing skills in India and other Asian countries is the second factor. This is the payoff of global knowledge and education. The level of local universities is rising fast, so does cooperation with Western universities. And many formers students from American universities are returning to their homeland, they become clever entrepreneurs and eventually suction up jobs from abroad. Judging by the number of editorial jobs posted on MonsterIndia, this is a heavy trend.
The third factor is the cost of telecommunication that is now asymptotically driving to zero. [Don't tell YouTube's parent, Google...] Speaking with or sending a page layout to a sub-editor costs the same, whether the individual is on another floor in the building or in Mumbai.
This explains the sequence of events we witnessed in recent years. Intellectual (non-engineering) off-shoring has evolved from human-based data-mining, to number-crunching, to basic-design, and now to news content. Reuters (now Thomson-Reuters) was the first to jump in 2004 when its financial service opened an office in Bangalore with 340 people. They where writing about quarterly results of Western companies and compiling analyst research. Since then, this facility has grown to approximately 1,600 jobs, with 100 journalists working on U.S. stories.
Non-English papers will be shielded from this transfer. In theory this will save jobs in Germany, France, Spain or Scandinavia. But in more realistic terms, events might take a different course: unloading selected non-core jobs will help US and UK newspapers to respond more swiftly to the market’s downsizing and, we hope, to do better than just survive. —FF
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