The News & Observer announced today that it is eliminating 16 jobs in advertising and outsourcing them to a Third World country. Now, I have no problem with that. You do what you can to keep the bottom line in black ink. Here’s the N&O’s take on the move:
“These kinds of decisions are never taken lightly,” said Al Autry, The N&O’s senior vice president of advertising. “They are truly done to try to make us a stronger operation in the future.”
Newspapers, however, have been hostile to outsourcing over the past 20 years or so, often wagging their editorial fingers whenever some entity found it more cost-effective to lay off workers and outsource the work. One of those finger-wagging editorials appeared in the N&O-owned Chapel Hill News a little over a year ago after UNC decided to outsource the work of 15 dental technicians in the School of Dentistry. Here’s what it said:
The decision to outsource the technicians’ work no doubt has other employees anxiously wondering who’s next. The dental technicians perform valuable work for patients, faculty and students. Some faculty members have said that in their experience the work done by outside companies tends to be far inferior to that done by the in-house technicians. You get what you pay for.
The editorial concluded that the technicians “deserve better than this.” It’s easy to be judgmental and preachy about outsourcing when you’re flush with advertising, your circulation is soaring and your profit margins dwarf those of any other industry. But things look quite different when lean times arrive and you have to face economic realities.
UPDATE: Here’s another example of a newspaper having to live down an earlier editorial.
