The recently held WAN (World Association of Newspapers) Conference in Hyderabad echoed the turmoil and tribulations that the global newspaper industry has been facing in the last few months. With the participation of several big brands from the publishing industry, the conference was the arena for a showdown between Google and News Corp. Les Hinton, CEO of Dow Jones, expressed his strong views on monetizing content online.

Shift in content: Newspapers minus News = Magazines

Content was a recurring theme in the conference. While newspapers have survived the mass penetration of radios and televisions, the internet has posed challenges that the industry is struggling to cope with. For starters, the rise of news aggregators has led to newspapers losing out on ‘news reporting’ as a differentiator. Continuous news updates are available on the net and the influx of Web 2.0 applications has allowed multimedia to be released on the internet in real-time. News reporting, earlier a pull factor for the newspapers now definitely belongs to the internet. Therefore newspapers cannot rely on reporting alone, but will need to emulate the content mix of magazines - Content that is rich in analysis and opinion with lesser focus on news reporting. The need of the hour is to figure out what readers want and how to source the required content.

Content sourcing: Is it possible?

Sourcing content has been around for as long as newspapers’ existence. What started with freelancers (non-full time employees), has moved to captives (in-house low cost offshore centers) and third party service providers. Typically, all newspapers have relied on:

•   Freelancers (includes guest writers and brand name columnists) to gain access to specialized knowledge or to source low cost content
•   Third party providers to access operational efficiency for process driven functions at low costs
•   Captives to have a multi-country presence for operations

Sourcing content internally or externally represents different sets of challenges and none of these can truly offer a complete solution in isolation (refer to diagram). Overcoming these challenges may require a paradigm shift in terms of how to acquire content. For example, sourcing content on federal/central policies on tax will require access to highly specialized knowledge. In such a scenario, it is cheaper to source content from a freelancer/guest writer who has the knowledge. Developing such talent in-house is not only expensive but also impractical.

   Source:ValueNotes Research

Newspapers need to move beyond retaining peripheral, process driven functions in-house. There has to be more focus on what content to create and how to source high quality content at a lower cost. Overcoming quality issues and inculcating cultural sensibilities still require significant effort from service providers. However, this bottleneck in content services can be overcome by bringing more freelancers with the required capabilities into the mix. After all, if Wikipedia can do it so can the newspaper industry!

(Arun Jethmalani, CEO, ValueNotes presented at the WAN Conference. His presentation was titled Editorial Outsourcing: Where is the newspaper industry heading? To download the presentation, please follow this LINK . Arun has also written a blog post about the conference)