Outsourcing the Newsroom

When I was a reporter at The News Tribune, we hired a copy editor from Texas. Although he knew the English language well, he was not familiar with New Jersey, and sometimes made errors, such as confusing the Garden State Parkway with the New Jersey Turnpike.

This comes to mind today because CNBC is reporting that the Orange County Register is outsourcing some of its copy-editing work to a company based in India. Given the state of the newspaper industry, publications all across the nation have been cutting costs through layoffs, consolidation and other measures -- but this is a new one.

Apparently, it is being done on a one-month trial basis. It will be very interesting to see how the trial goes and what direction the newspaper takes afterwards.