New Zealand Newspaper Publisher Outsources Editing, Production

I was sorely tempted to call this, "And Now A Word From Out Outsourcer." According to an AP report, New Zealand newspaper publisher APN News & Media is outsourcing editing and layout of the country's biggest daily. By the end of 2007, the contracting firm, Pagemasters New Zealand, will be editing APN's seven papers using 45 editors, nearly 30 fewer than the papers themselves used. The company's owner also has other media properties, including some newspapers in Ireland that will be following a similar course. The APN executive who has led the New Zealand project said, "I'm confident readers won't notice the difference."

That may be, at least if all goes well, but are editors mere functionaries that improve copy and lay it out? Or are they generally an intrinsic part of filtering through and choosing news direction? I've never worked on staff at a newspaper, but it seems to me that there is the potential for some conflict of interest. The outsourcing firm - which is owned by New Zealand Associated Press, and so certainly having access to expertise - is, nevertheless, going to be primarily concerned with efficiency, not necessarily the underlying mission of the papers.

Mission may sound quaint to some who would argue that these newspapers are business concerns and must be treated as such. Yet that's what I'm doing. When the primary interest of a business is making money, they it ceases to care about what else it does and customers cease to care about doing business with it. No one owes a company attention or sales; that comes as a consequence of providing something to customers. I understand the need to constrain costs, but no company has ever trimmed its way into greatness. I'm sure lowering overhead is what APN is gaining. I wonder if anyone has tallied what it might be losing.

Editor Returns to PC World, But Does "Good" Win Out?

In another of my blogs I had mentioned that PC World editor Harry McCracken had left the publication because of pressure from the advertising side of the house. It seems that a pro/con set of articles about Macs - both written by people who knew and liked the machines - had drawn ire either the advertiser didn't like negative press, or someone was afraid that it wouldn't.

So now McCracken is back at PC World after a week and the magazine's CEO, Colin Crawford, has returned to his previous duties as vice president of online content. Some in the publishing industry have been cheering this as a rare victory of integrity over advertising, but I'm not sure that's really the case.

This seems clearly a move to stem bad press. Had publisher IDG really thought that advertising pressure to censor articles was so egregious, I suspect it would have dismissed Crawford. But it didn't. Instead, management transferred him back to from whence he came. But IDG has been vocal about how online is really the future for the company. So the person who was ready to push editors and tailor content (and pretty mild content at that - oooh, the puck mouse was a loser, what a burn!) to turn a magazine into a PR outlet is now in charge of the publisher's future. Now there's a decisive - and telling - move.