In 2004, Reuters decided to set up a center in Bangalore with a small team focused on data and news gathering. Today the 'fledgling team' has grown to a sizeable 1,000+ and has evolved to reporting financial news, writing complex stories as well as handling the entire IT database operations.

Apart from Reuters, the early successes of media bigwigs like Time Warner and CNET have paved the way for several American and British newspapers and publishers to explore offshoring options. In the business of "news", overnight turnaround from an offshore destination adds to the value proposition apart from the much-touted cost advantage.

Typically Offshoreable Services

Commonly offshored services include:

• Content writing and editorial services
• Data collection and analysis
• Advertising production and design
• Conversion from prepress/editorial application to ePaper/eMagazines
• News archiving by digital conversion of historical/current newspapers
• Managing and updating information databases

The number of newspapers offshoring parts of their service needs is constantly growing. A list of some of the key offshore service buyers:

The Indian Scenario

While there are several established Indian vendors (like Macmillan, Thomson, TechBooks) serving the global STM and academic publishers, there are very few vendors catering specifically to the newspaper segment. Many of the large international publishers have set up their own captives, and the list includes the likes of Reuters, Time Warner and Sostene.

Bangalore-based Ninestars with employee strength of over 1,000 is one of the prominent players in this space, and offers a wide range of services. Others like Affinity Express (now apart of Philippine-based Ayala Corp), ExpressKCS provide a variety of ad production services. Recently, CCI Europe (Publishing systems developer) and The Hindu (Indian newspaper) have planned to offer production services to the US/UK newspapers. Despite the growing demand there is a dearth of Indian vendors with the capability to provide specifically tailored services to newspaper publishers.

The Opportunity

The newspaper publishing industry in the US alone is expected to cross $50 billion in 2008. Dwindling ad revenues, primarily due to competition from new digital media as well as rising input costs are forcing newspapers to re-structure their costs in order to maintain margins. Offshoring provides them that leverage. Apart from shaving costs, offshoring also enables creation of alternate revenue streams. For instance, the investment required to build products like news archival services, image archival, etc. will be much lower at an offshore destination.

For Indian vendors, the opportunity to provide services to the global newspaper and news publishing industry is tremendous, especially for the mid-sized and small media companies that cannot afford captive setups.

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4. Newspaper Publishing: Opportunities Ahead
5. Editorial Offshoring: Gaining Momentum