Category Archives: Broadcast Media

Newspaper Deathwatch: OC Register Tests Outsourcing Editing to India

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When Reuters did this 6 years ago, we all laughed at them. “Want curry with that?” Now respected American daily The Orange County Register has begun a test using a New Delhi firm for editing tasks. From BusinessWeek:

Orange County Register Communications Inc. will begin a one-month trial with Mindworks Global Media at the end of June, said John Fabris, a deputy editor at the Register.

Mindworks’ Web site says the company is based outside New Delhi and provides “high-quality editorial and design services to global media firms … using top-end journalistic and design talent in India.”

So what’s it mean? In the short term, nothing. In the long term its just one more bit of evidence that the print publishing model for newspapers isn’t going to work forever. In fact just minutes ago The Washington Post posted this:

…We wonder and worry, too. Anxiety has intensified this year with an accelerating decline in newspaper advertising, and it has hit home for us in a particularly painful way this spring, first with the early retirements of scores of colleagues and then, this week, with Len Downie‘s announcement that he’ll step down Sept. 8 after 17 years as executive editor.

Meanwhile, Bloomberg last week noted that The New York Times has seen it’s biggest Ad Revenue drop of the year during May.

Ad sales at the News Media Group, including the New York Times and Boston Globe, fell to $130 million, the company said in a statement today. Total sales declined 6.6 percent to $227.5 million as increased circulation revenue couldn’t offset drops in national, retail and classified ads.

The deterioration in May advertising mirrors drops at other U.S. newspaper publishers. Gannett Co., the owner of USA Today, reported yesterday that newspaper ad sales fell 14 percent in May. Those declines follow the industry’s worst quarter on record in the three months through March, according to the Newspaper Association of America.

“Expectations were that 2008 would be similar to 2007, but clearly things have gotten worse,” John Morton, an independent newspaper industry analyst in Silver Spring, Maryland, said in an interview. “Classified is in a tailspin, and there’s no hope for newspaper advertising until they win back some of that revenue.”

Meanwhile, in the This Week In Media Podcast this week, Alec Lindsey suggested that 2010 was the year that the model would break for the broadcast television market, stating that it would probably be the first year in which a revenue decline would be seen in the Upfronts. So, Mr. Television, your time is coming…

The real message here is that the traditional media model is utterly broken, and while it may be too late for print, television might still have time. My money is on the new online media providers and the networks slowly cutting their affiliates and the cable outlets out of the loop.

Media Bias is Us

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Read the following statement:

The media is utterly biased.  Obviously biased sources like (choose one: Fox News | The New York Times) spout a constant stream of propaganda from (choose one: the dastardly Republicans | the evil Democrats | our Alien Overlords) which is meant to deceive us from the truth.

The problem we face today is that the way in which we get our news is fundementally changing.   Instead of getting a cross section of the news that someone really smart (read news editor) thought we’d need to know, we’re as likely getting our news from heavily biased secondary sources, also known as blogs, forums, etc.  We forget that a blog like this one is roughly analagous to the content you’d get from a columnist in a newspaper.  That means it’s opinion.  Opinion is, by its very definition, biased. 

So as we decry the problem of media bias in the primary sources of media, we’re gravitating to sources that are in fact much more biased.  We move from Fox News to Drudge Report or Instapundit, from The New York Times to the Huffington Post.  And in the process we’re losing out on the local, we miss the voice telling us that something should be on our radar, not merely showing us that which is already on our radar in a way that reinforces the way we already percieve it.

The problem is that when we have start to move from a primary source to a secondary news source, we’ve got to fill in for all the other stuff.  Like the weather (okay, we add a widget for weather to our desktop) or traffic (we get an sms update to our cell phone), but there is so much else.  Do we really want to have an obituary widget so we can watch for notices on people we know?. 

We’re moving to a model where we’re only as good as our information, and our access to information is limited by our ability to find, process and filter that information.

CBS Talks About Outsourcing Reporting to CNN

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CBS News in Talks to Outsource to CNNThis could be the beginning of the end for primary source news. Actually Reuters experimented by moving many editorial positions to India a couple years ago. In this case, for CBS to basically give up and consider hiring CNN to do the work means yet another hard blow to the news industry.

I’ve got more coming up tomorrow on this issue (at least tangentally) but for now, I’ll just say this: when we remove the primary sources of news, we don’t have any news left.

Of course, the other side of the coin is that perhaps this is just a shaking out of the weak sisters, which is a good thing in any industry (as long as you aren’t one of those getting shaken out).