San Jose Mercury News, Mumbai Edition
The gallows humor of MediaNews' Bay Area operation took a cartographic turn recently. Remember MediaNews CEO Dean Singleton talking about how outsourcing would become essential in the newspaper industry, when he said, "In today's world, whether your desk is down the hall or around the
world, from a computer standpoint, it doesn't matter," after his speech at the Southern Newspaper Publishers Association?
Well, Bay Area News Group (BANG) staffers decided Dean's words needed illustration. They created a new map showing the familiar newspaper titles, including the once-proud San Jose Mercury News, Contra Costa Times, Oakland Tribune and Marin Independent-Journal (with the Santa Cruz Sentinel written in) spread across the western India states of Gujarat and Maharashtra, the latter the state dominated by Mumbai, a major outsourcing center.
Here it is, in all its glory, photographed from one of its postings on a newspaper bulletin board.
At US papers, outsourcing of ad production has reached major proportions. Finance outsourcing is in process, and yes, newspapers are looking at what can't be done by lower-paid, English speakers.
Though farther-flung circulation is still being cut back at the dailies — that's still publishers' favorite explanation for plummeting circulation — maybe the move of the nameplates could be a smart counter-intuitive strategy.
After all, in India, newspaper readership keeps going up.
From the World Association of Newspaper 2008 Trends report:
74 of the world’s 100 best selling dailies are published in Asia. China, Japan and India account for 62 of them.
The
five largest markets for newspapers are: China, with 107 million copies
sold daily; India, with 99 million copies daily; Japan, with 68 million
copies daily; the United States, with nearly 51 million; and Germany,
20.6 million.
Indian newspaper sales increased 11.22 percent in 2007 and 35.51 percent in the five-year period.
Wonder if they're hiring?
