The Miami Herald has killed a project to outsource editorial production of a zoned section to workers in India. Good move. It was a bad idea in the first place. Next they should kill the idea of outsourcing website comment monitoring, which is a rich source of leads and perspective that can help journalists reconnect with the real world.
But outsourcing can be a good idea. The criteria for outsourcing are simple:
- It's not a competitive advantage to retain the work in-house. (This is where the Miami Herald erred. Editorial judgment is a key competitive advantage.)
- There's a financial advantage to outsourcing.
- External sources sources are reliable and competent in meeting your current and future needs.
Some examples:
The Chicago Sun-Times has outsourced some delivery to the Chicago Tribune, its direct competitor. Delivery is delivery is delivery. The San Francisco Chronicle is outsourcing its printing. So are many other dailies. Commercial printing typically runs an operating margin in the low single digits. Is that the business you want to be in? Many papers have outsourced classified advertising and circulation call centers. (Key question: Is the vendor competent?)
But what about the Internet? The same rules apply. Most software is a commodity, and in fact open source solutions meet most of your needs -- so don't reinvent the wheel. Hosting? Look at how Web 2.0 startups are taking advantage of Amazon EC2 and S3 tools. Design? Only the largest companies may be able to cost-justify maintaining the depth of expertise necessary to do quality site design work; even the Washington Post is hiring an outside firm for its major redesign.
A common consulting workshop exercise is to ask participants to design a competitor: If someone handed you X million dollars to compete with your current employer, what would you do? Answering that question can illuminate some paths you should take in your current job. If you spend some time thinking like a Web startup, designing a virtual company where everything is outsourced, you may come to some startling conclusions.
Comments
The customer loses in my opinion
All I know about this outsourcing, so far, is what I have seen first hand in the newspaper where I have worked for 25+ years in display advertising, is that the product our customers are going to get from the outsourcing firms, even the ones in the US, is a much poorer-quality product than what they are getting from our staff.
None of us make a whole heck of a lot compared to the suits that hold whim over our jobs.
It is frustrating to see the mid and upper level management that have all migrated to us from the well-known media corp Scripps-Howard, care not a whit for real quality or what is best for their bread-and-butter: the customer.
Damn shame.
Still outsourcing advertorial
I have met the CEO of this firm on a few different occasions (In Moscow and Boston) and what his company is really good at is handling the advertorial - preprinted workload. Assembly work, essentially that takes your copy and art and delivers camera-ready or completes the work to finished files using your existing pagination system. I saw some of the work they do for UK pubs and the South China Morning Post - impressive.
It is a huge leap from that type of work to jump into the editorial decision making process that local news presentation demands and that's where Anders drew the line - but the advertorial work seems to be still be on track. If doing that non-editorial work at 40 percent of the cost from a remote location saves editorial jobs and expertise in a newsroom - why wouldn't you try for that?
Outsourcing vs. centralizing design
Much to the chagrin of my Society for News Design friends, I've said for years that most U.S. newspapers are overstaffed in design specialties (on the print side), and passed the level of what I call "design affluence" years ago.
In Internet design, I would argue that a newspaper *group* of any size could centralize resources as a viable alternative to outsourcing. You're right that only the largest individual newspaper brands or best-preserved media conglomerates could afford to hire agencies to develop state-of-the-art Web/Internet designs for single brands. WaPo, yeah. My hometown paper, no. But my hometown paper's owner, GateHouse, possibly.
At Scripps (not sure of the context of the last commenter's reference to "Scripps-Howard," so I'll leave that alone), we have a small team within the corporate newspapers interactive group that manages the design fundamentals for 15 newspaper.coms and related niche sites. At that scale "insourcing" works quite well for us -- we can afford industry-leading designers, modern tools and training. And I believe our User Experience team's work speaks for itself.
But it would be grossly impractical, or at best would lead to mediocre work, to have Web design teams at each of those papers. Local design resources, if any, are best spent on designing visual presentation of news and advertising content, not the actual site "wireframes" that content gets poured into.
Don Wittekind's long-standing SND program to train information graphics artists on Flash presentation techniques is the kind of thing best applied at the local level. But having every local newspaper try to run its own content management template architecture, or conduct its own user testing, or slap its own section header/footer designs into third-party database applications without consideration of the whole-site experience -- that's the kind of stuff you can't really outsource and shouldn't replicate locally. That's where a corporate economy-of-scale effort can shine.
Spoken, of course, like the corporate weasel I am.
Overstaffed on Design? Huh...
Jay,
I'm not sure what newspapers you worked at, the papers I've been at were never overstaffed with designers. The real problem has always been hiring talented designers, and then giving them the freedom to let their creativity shine.
Many smaller newspapers are designed by "copy editors" who shouldn't be doing any design, except maybe the obits page and jump pages. Newspapers continue to look dull and unattractive across the country. A well designed product that looks compelling will sell better than a well written product that looks garish.
I think you make some good points about consolidating web designers and finding efficiencies with group efforts. And yes, have your local web designer working on that daily stuff to help drive traffic with compelling and interesting art.
Thanks for sharing,
What 'design affluence' means
I'm sure Steve didn't intend this thread to head off on staffing of print newspaper design, but I do want to clarify my points for Patrick.
First, I have nothing against creativity. I just prefer that creativity in commercial ventures be applied for the good of those commercial ventures. Newspaper designers, visual journalists and graphic artists are not fine artists by trade -- their work is commercial, meaning it is supposed to meet business objectives and not just the creative goals of the individual.
As such, once a newspaper reaches "design affluence" (which I describe better here and here), investments in high design and high creativity return less and less.
You said: "Newspapers continue to look dull and unattractive across the country."
I know and can point to exceptions, but in general, I disagree. Papers may look dull to designers, but to everyday readers, the most important considerations remain:
1. Can I read it easily?
2. Can I tell what is being conveyed as most important?
3. Is the content interesting/relevant/provocative to me?
Competent formatting addresses the first two problems well enough, and I'd argue most papers I see are competently formatted -- easy enough to read and browse.
Even the best design can't do much about No. 3. If the content is dull, good design doesn't help. In fact, if the design is wildly creative and exciting and imaginative but the content is dull, the design is really just false advertising.
At any rate, most U.S. newspapers have most of their paid circulation home delivered. So the product is already bought by the time design has any effect on its usage. I can't imagine circulation call centers receiving any cancellation notices because the features poster design wasn't creative enough. But I know they get calls when the paper is unreadable, or printed badly, or just not interesting enough to take out of the wrapper.
So...
Take interactive out of the equation for the moment. Given the choice between preserving investment in high design, and preserving investment in creating and managing content in the print product, I'd be shifting FTEs to put reporters, photographers and infographics specialists on the subject of gathering and telling stories.
Throw online into the mix, and the other specialty I'd be investing in is community building and management.
It's nothing personal, designer friends. It's just business.