Media Matters: FIRST TO THIRD WORLD?

By M H AHSAN

"REUTERS Outsourcing Journalism" made a catchy headline but it was inaccurate. This development has got enormous play, but represents neither outsourcing nor journalism. It is offshoring, creating a captive unit in India, and what Reuters does here is less journalism and more financial research to feed to its data services. Outsourced journalism is a concept with great potential which more Indian publishers would like to crack, but guess what, the First World got there first.

Did you think outsourcing was a first-to-third world concept? It might be for call centres, data services and subscription services. It isn't for journalism which has to break into a market still dominated by First World journalists. Outsourced journalism, better known as contract publishing or custom publishing is a growth industry in the West.

Not necessarily offshore It does not necessarily mean an offshore operation. The Press Association in the United Kingdom calls itself U.K.'s leading editorial services provider and its customers include HELLO! Magazine, The Guardian, OK! Magazine, The Mirror and a wide range of regional newspapers. "Every page we produce meets the style, format and design guidelines of the individual publication." They also have clients in Europe.

This is contract publishing, and when it extends to producing entire magazines for commercial clients it is known as custom publishing. Currently there are big names offering custom publishing services: Thompson, Pearson, Ziff Davis Media. That is the market Indian publishers would have to break into.

The scene in India Indians would have a pricing advantage but would they get the same high end work in the international market? They would have to work at it. The company with the best fix on media outsourcing and where India fits into the global scenario, is Cybermedia, located in Gurgaon. A 22-year-old publishing enterprise with nine specialised magazines, it sees outsourcing as packaging or back-ending for books, as well as magazines and newspapers. At the low end you do type setting and data conversion. At the high end you even find the authors. At Cybermedia they want to do value-added stuff and move up the value chain. At the low end, the competition is within India, from outfits in Chennai or Mumbai who would do the job cheaper. At the high end, the competition is currently Australia which is into outsourced book and contract publishing in a big way.

Currently it repurposes, reformats, redesigns and replicates content for an international market, but ideally Cybermedia would like to be in the specialised magazine business, doing content, layouts, page-making and design. However pricing is an issue. Americans see India as a cheap location, but Indian media outfits, are fighting this. "We want a decent price. Americans come and haggle. They squeeze, we d not want to be squeezed. We can may be do it for 50 per cent less, not 75 per cent less. Ireland and Australia are doing outsourced work which could come to India if we offered a better price and got the quality right, and after India, Bangladesh would be waiting. As we go up the value chain, low end work may go away. Someone may set up a cheaper location in Africa," says Rajiv Seth, Cybermedia's president for content creation.

It helps first of all to get the terms right: offshoring is the creation of a unit overseas by a publishing company or a news service. Before Reuters it was tried by Britannica which couldn't get it right and shut down its unit. The option to captive offshoring is to outsource to a third party vendor abroad, something that is seen as being more cost effective and in some ways more painless. Reuters' Global Head of Content was already complaining at the launch of his centre in Bangalore about wage inflation and poor infrastructure. Had he been outsourcing he wouldn't have to worry about either.

Both outsourcing and offshoring in journalism is happening from India but it is little known and very small. Indo-Asian News Service (IANS) does contract publishing mainly for non-resident Indian clients. It produces ready-to-print pages for English, Gujarati and Punjabi newspapers in London and New York, not just pages but the entire publication in some cases. Recently in New York, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh was proudly presented a copy of one of these, called Sher e Punjab, because he figured on its cover. It is published out of New York and Canada.
IANS also does the same for websites and produces a magazine for a Dubai NRI called Global Indian which is only printed there. From cover design to content and pagination, it is all done from a basement in South Delhi. It also has an Arabic portal which retails its output as news and feature content for Arab clients. It would be happy to move on to custom publishing as well — it can see that there is a future in this whole business if India can get the pricing and quality right.
A different case A rather different example comes from an Indian-owned newspaper in Mauritius called Le Matinal. It was launched last month by Delhi-based Asia Pacific Communications Associates (APCA ) which already runs two newspapers in Nepal. Le Matinal is a broadsheet daily with 16 pages in French and four pages in English on weekdays and Sundays and 16 and eight respectively on Saturdays. The English pages in both cases are produced by a desk at the APCA headquarters and zipped across the Internet to the publishing site in Mauritius. Content comes from AFP, Reuters, IANS, the International Herald Tribune, The Times of India, Economic Times, and King Features.

Why do it from here? Because the Mauritius rupee is harder than the Indian one and the salary bill in Delhi represents a saving of Rs. one lakh per month. You also save on all the things that Mauritius decrees journalists must get: fare to and from work, food after 7.30 pm, a month's bonus every year and night drops which cost more there. APCA is keen to offer such an offshore service to clients in the United States and has commissioned a study to gauge the potential.
To go up the value chain you need better bandwidth, 512 kbps, which APCA has now, or multiples of that as Cybermedia anticipates it might need. And you need a local interface in the countries you are targeting. Cybermedia has local people in the U,S., the U.K. and Australia to give feedback on quality, so that they get it right. To hire them costs money so you cannot do the job really cheap, only cheaper.
No cause for euphoria then, as yet.