8 trends to track in '08

The Newspaper Association of America magazine cover story is "8 Trends to Track in '08."

One trend is "leaner operations," and the story cites MediaNews' consolidated copy desks as an example. David Butler, the new Mercury News editor, says the system "allows you to operate more efficiently because you're editing common stories and pages once" and not at every paper in the chain. But he acknowledges that "if a copy editor doesn't know the local community, the potential to look stupid -- putting Broadway Avenue rather than Broadway Street -- is presumably higher."

Since April 2007, Dispatch Printing Co., which prints The Columbus (Ohio) Dispatch, has been outsourcing its ad production to Affinity Express (www.affinityexpress.com), a graphics services provider headquartered in Elgin, Ill., with production offices in Pune, India, and Manila, Philippines

“The reality for newspapers is to save costs as much as possible,” says Joe Gallo, Dispatch Printing’s vice president and chief information officer. For newspapers to continue offering clients free ad design, they must find cost effective ways to provide the service. One option is outsourcing, Gallo says.

In contrast, the San Jose Mercury News had a better experience when it outsourced ad production to Express KCS (www.expresskcs.com) in July 2007. “We’re doing 100 percent of our ad production offshore,” says Mary Evans, director of advertising operations. The move also provided a way for several newspapers in the San Francisco Bay area—all members of the California Newspapers Partnership—to standardize ad production business operations.

Last August, MediaNews consolidated news operations for its cluster of 11 daily newspapers in northern California under the Bay Area News Group-East Bay. The group installed a new front-end system to link the newsrooms and allow staffs to work together on stories, and a common copy desk in Walnut Creek, Calif., will soon edit all content. Staff training began last month for the new system, which should be fully operational by the end of April, says Kevin Keane, executive editor of the group.

Click on the headline to read the NAA article.