Not even a little bit, not even at all

There are two reasons I sit in Maastricht with my former employer, McClatchy Company, on the brain.

The former is more pleasant than the later, so we’ll start with the good news. My friend and former colleague Shanda Cook was kind enough to contact me via Facebook this week to let me know I won a writing award from the South Carolina Press Association. Clearly, good news.

The second reason is because of the first item in today’s Romanesko e-mail roundup of media news.

The Charlotte Observer, a McClatchy Company newspaper, will lay off 25 of 14 jobs in its ad design group. It will instead, as the article details, hire employees of an Illinois company called Affinity Express… whose facilities are in the Philippines and India.

Also, the Raleigh News and Observer (another McClatchy paper) will also cut employees and begin doing business with Affinity Express.

First off, a disclaimer: As an American working for a Dutch company, I of course understand that I am not in a strong position to critique the idea of foreigners working for domestic operations.

On the other hand, I wonder how many of these employees were offered the chance to move to Philippines or India. If you gave me the chance to relocate to either one of those places, I would certainly consider it. But I highly doubt any of these American citizens were given that chance.

On another note, I must admit I grew up enchanted with the idea of newspapers. As soon as I abandoned the prospective career paths of Olympic swimmer and physical education teacher, I wanted to be a journalist. A lot of my life has been about pursuing (and sometimes achieving) that goal. But, part of the reason I came to work at the EJC was to broaden myself professionally. I know the profession is changing. Professionally, I recognise and accept this.

Emotionally, though, not really. From my negative gut reaction to today’s news out of Charlotte, maybe So maybe a psychologist would tell me I’m in the second stage of grief: Anger.

Sure, I understand that this is about a McClatchy decision to lay off advertising staff. Of course, as a (former?) news-side person, I am glad that these cuts are not on the newsroom side. And heck, maybe these cuts have to happen to save news-side jobs.

That said: Despite the recent change of course at The Miami Herald (again, McClatchy Co.) which decided against a proposed attempt to outsource part of it’s copy desk to a group called Mindworks, based in New Delhi, India, I see this as a slippery slope.

Are page designers next?

I can understand why the copy desk experiment failed - you wouldn’t want your journalists and editors to be geographically separated. But thinking back to my own experiences with McClatchy Company (at a paper with a circulation of about, I think, 20,000) most of the page designers are doing their thing in the latter half of the day. Typically without discussion with reporters or story editors, many of whom were never around in the evenings (I know this because I worked in sports, often till around 12 a.m., or later).

In the sports department, for example, a page designer would come in sometime around 4 p.m., confer briefly with our section editor, and then be on his own for the night.

So really, he could be sitting anywhere.

Maybe this was possible because my former section editor is one of the most organised leaders I’ve met. And maybe that’s the way things worked because the newspaper was small.

However, thinking back, I do really think newspapers could outsource some of their page design work.

And I think they could save money doing it.

But, I don’t like this idea. I am sure there are wonderful designers in the Phillipines and in India. Truly, I enjoy the design of foreign newspapers, finding them to be more colourful, exciting and innovative.

But I think there’s something to be gained for designers and reporters working together. There is a lot of cohesiveness that can be achieved in newsprint (and online) products when there is synergy, people working together. I used to meet one-on-one with the sports design guys to discuss layout concepts I could help them implement. And our section always fared quite well in contests and in local courts of public opinion.

Then, looking at this from another angle: What about human rights? This deal is going to save about 40 percent on labour. Which I would imagine is because wages will be lower in India and the Philippines – and benefits will be less, insurance expenses will be less. Maybe hours worked will be more, who knows.

But isn’t this starting to get at the heart of what has so many people feeling conflicted about the upcoming Olympic Games in China? Human rights abuses? Government systems with few labour laws? Governments who close down information tracks?

I can’t imagine myself, at my former job, walking to the other side of the building and telling the very nice ad folks, “Sorry, time to go home. And please don’t come back. I’m giving your job to someone in India. And no, you can’t move there to have the job. It’s just gone.”

I can’t imagine this any more than telling my friend, Shanda, that her job as a features designer was being outsourced.

These are reasons why I am fully in favour of politicians levying taxes against American businesses which fire their employees and outsource work like this.

Because what about all the money and time American taxpayers put into educating and training this white collar labour force we’re laying off?

In the end, I find this trend both scary and sad – sad because I don’t want it to continue, but scary because I think it will.

Posted on January 31, 2008 by .
Filed under personal.