All The News Printed To Fit

Newspaper publisher APN News and Media has taken the extraordinary step of outsourcing its editorial production.

Traditionally a newspaper publisher would have in-house (from an editorial perspective) a team of journalists under the day-to-day guidance of a chief of staff who received instruction from the editor. Stories filed by the journalists would then go to sub-editors who proofread the content, write the head line and then layout the stories read for production.

According to the story it is the sub-editors' jobs at the New Zealand Herald and a few of its subsidiaries which are being outsourced to a firm called Pagemasters, a division of the Australian Associated Press.

It's an astounding move which will have repercussions across the newspaper industry.

The question which isn't asked (or answered) in the story is 'why?'.

Are NZ Herald subs so under-utilised that laying out a daily newspaper can be treated in the same way as an old fashioned secretarial pool?

What happens to the local knowledge of an experienced sub who has undoubtedly save a journalist or two from suffering embarrassment or even a law suit as a result of picking up an error of fact, a peculiar spelling or arcane fact?

For some parts of a newspaper's operation, outsourcing is a perfectly acceptable, cost-effective way to free resources and better employ journalists - the Gold Coast Bulletin, for instance, outsources the production of all of its advertising features - however there is a difference between advertising copy and news.