Now here is a very significant piece of news. The New Zealand arm of Tony O'Reilly's media empire, APN News & Media, is to outsource 70 sub-editing and design jobs. According to the Fairfax-owned Wellington Dominion Post the decision will ensure a struggle with staff.
In a statement APN announced that it is evaluating a plan to buy production services from Pagemasters, a Melbourne-based subsidiary of theAustralian Associated Press news agency. If a deal is agreed PageMasters will set up an office in Auckland and may well take on some APN staff.
The titles affected by the move include APN's flagship, the Auckland-based New Zealand Herald, and a range of provincial titles such as the Northern Advocate, Hawke's Bay Today, Bay of Plenty Times, and the Daily Post. Other titles affected are the weekly giveaway The Aucklander, The Listener magazine and the weekender, Herald on Sunday.
Unions representing APN staff have already registered opposition to the plan. Andrew Little, secretary of the engineering, printing and manufacturing union, said: "We plan to fight it."
But APN's publishing chief Martin Simons says the outsourcing plan reflects global trends in newspaper publishing. Well, let's be honest, it certainly reflects general business trends, but it has not been tried thus far with journalism. What it does reflect is O'Reilly's own belief, expressed in an interview with me last year, that newspaper production can be both centralised and outsourced, and it represents the first major trial of his idea.
However, (thanks to commenter Adam Maguire) I am reminded that O'Reilly is planning to do the same at his Irish newspapers. His Dublin-based company, Independent News & Media, announced earlier this month that it plans to make 34 production staff redundant, in the first phase of outsourcing the production of its Irish newspapers to a company called RE&D. It is owned by two former Irish Independent employees, Michael Wolesley and Graham O'Neill.
If these two experiments at each end of the globe come off, then the subs at The Independent may well wonder if their jobs are safe for much longer. And if it all works out in Ireland and New Zealand then other publishers across the world - who are always seeking successful cost-cutting initiatives - will surely follow O'Reilly's lead. It signals yet another change in the world of newsprint, though it's probably just a stage on the road to a world without newsprint at all.
