Friday, December 07, 2007

Sacramtento Bee sends ad work to India

The Sacranento Bee is outsourcing some of its advertising production work to India, the newspaper announced Wednesday.

The move, scheduled to be completed next summer, will affect 13 out of 24 artists' jobs in The Bee's ad department. Those 13 workers, who represent less than 1 percent of the paper's total work force, will be eligible for severance pay and other benefits, said Ed Canale, the paper's vice president of business development.

The work is being transferred to Express KCS, a San Jose company whose production offices are in Gurgaon and New Delhi, India.

Other U.S. corporations have outsourced work in recent years to save money; newspapers, under pressure from declining revenue and profits, are no exception.

But Bee officials said they're making the move because Express KCS will give better service to the paper's advertisers.

"It's about improving our service to our customers," Canale said. "We are sort of following the lead of some other papers that have done this successfully."

In particular, he said, The Bee has studied the work Express KCS has done for the Fresno Bee, which, like this paper, is owned by The McClatchy Co. of Sacramento.

In August, McClatchy outsourced its circulation customer service to an Illinois company that operates from sites in the United States and the Philippines.

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