Is Editorial Outsourcing Unhealthy?

I love my editor, mainly because he's local
Thursday, August 11, 2011

By Brian O'Neill, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

Can we call The Hartford Courant "the nation's oldest newspaper" if it's older than the nation itself?

That's the kind of minutia that copy editors live for -- excuse me, the kind of minutia for which copy editors live. They'd make sure there's an apostrophe in "it's" while they're proofreading, too.

I have my eye on the Courant because, starting this fall, Connecticut's largest newspaper is going to be produced in Chicago. That's right. All the copy editing and design will be done by its sister paper, the Chicago Tribune, to save money.

We all know about outsourcing. Just try to buy a toy, a shirt or flashlight made in America. And when your personal computer's on the fritz and you call technical services for help, there's going to be some guy in Mumbai, India, who has taken the alias "Mike" who's going to walk you through it.

I have difficulty seeing how anything as unique as your local newspaper will benefit by some outlander looking for errors, though.

Oh, sure, they'll be able to find the errant comma. (Our own copy editor John O'Brien once planned an entire book on that exciting subject alone, "The Comma Sutra.") But what is a wordsmith in Illinois going to know about the streets of Hartford, Conn., or the politics of Connecticut?

Only an editor who knows the terrain can save the reporter from truly embarrassing mistakes.

Take Pittsburgh's 90 neighborhoods or Allegheny County's 130 municipalities. Do you think an out-of-town fact-checker would know his Edgewood from his Edgeworth, or Sewickley Heights from Sewickley Hills?

Pittsburgh's neighborhood boundaries are even murkier. Their outlines are among the most democratic and elastic boundaries on Earth, constantly redefined and renamed by either popular will or some power broker's rebranding (e.g., "the North Shore," which will never be anything but the North Side, or simply "The Ward," to old-timers).

Many years ago, I went round and round with a copy editor who insisted that Central Catholic High School was in Squirrel Hill, because an official city map -- but no person in its vicinity -- put everything south of that stretch of Fifth Avenue in Squirrel Hill.

I wasn't able to wrestle the school back into Oakland until I pointed out that if we set it in Squirrel Hill, we'd have to inform students that they'd been taking the wrong bus to school for generations.

Knowledge like that can't come from dictionaries or the Associated Press Stylebook, but many newspaper number-crunchers want to consolidate production to save money. Gannett, Media General and the Tribune Co. are all centralizing their editing operations.

The Daily Press in Newport News, Va., has been produced about 900 miles away, in Chicago, for more than a year now. Its reporters and editors speak the same language, but the Tidewater accents that make the coastal city distinct will inevitably be lost in some Midwestern translations.

Perhaps I can make that point clearer by revealing my own modus operandi: When I have what looks like a final version of a column, I shoot it to a nearby copy machine and walk it over to an editor who is as Pittsburgh as "The Steelers Polka."

Maybe a half-hour later, he'll walk back with a half-dozen or more suggested changes. Sometimes he has corrected spelling or grammar, sometimes he seeks greater clarity and occasionally he asks me to defend an opinion.

You don't need to know your West End from your East End to do that, but just a few weeks ago, I had a brain cramp and inexplicably wrote "Steelers Coach Bill Cowher" when I meant "Mike Tomlin."

There was nothing in the context of the column that would have told you that was wrong, but the editor caught it because he recognized the main character in my column was unlikely to have known Mr. Cowher.

Would a copy editor in Chicago have caught that? Not on your autographed picture of Mike Ditka.

I don't expect the journalistic outsourcing trend to reverse itself, however. Newspaper chains can save millions of dollars by downsizing, and so they do it, and the change is not immediately obvious.

Mindworks Global Media in India has gotten outsourced work from American publications for a few years now. Tonight, when I hit my knees, I may ask God to make sure that nobody in New Delhi ever has to figure out where Bloomfield ends and Garfield begins.

Read more: http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/11223/1166589-155-0.stm#ixzz1Vbz3bPkp