Sydney Morning Herald editor working on plan to bring production back in-house
The Sydney Morning Herald may take its sub-editing back inhouse, editor-in-chief Darren Goodsir has revealed, saying it is always possible to reverse a “dumb idea”.
Goodsir, second from left, speaking at the SMH readers event
Goodsir told an audience of SMH subscribers that he was contemplating bringing production into Sydney after it was outsourced to New Zealand, initially to AAP’s Pagemasters and later to a Fairfax subbing hub.
His comments came on the same day that the New Zealand Herald, owned by NZME, revealed that it will end its contract with Pagemasters and once again “insource” its sub-editing.
The original move saw Fairfax save millions of dollars as it made long-serving sub editing staff redundant and shifted sub editing and production offshore. The role of sub-editors includes checking the content of articles written by reporters for accuracy and style, writing headlines and fitting articles onto newspaper pages.
The move by Fairfax led to public criticisms of production errors including old pages or articles being republished. Last year Fairfax’s Australian Financial Review apologised after a production error led to the publication of the headline”World is fukt”.
Goodsir
Asked by a member of the audience about the issue, Goodsir said: “Some of the decisions that we’ve taken have been fantastic and some have been less than optimal, but all against the backdrop of witheringly fast change… and against the backdrop of a commercial environment which is, to say the least, tough.
“We have taken the decision about 18 months ago to have some of our production done in New Zealand. I’m monitoring that closely – it’s had mixed results, to say the least, and the quality of our journalism is something I care deeply about because it is critical to retaining our loyal readers and subscribers.
“I note today that the New Zealand Herald which also outsourced its production and sub editing, has done what I am working on, which is this novel concept called insourcing, which is actually bringing back the production into the newsroom.
“That is now much more able to be done because of changes in technology and a lot of the systems we’re working with, that marry what were once disparate platforms – print and digital – into one seamless piece of journalism.
“We care deeply about it. Watch this space.”
Later in the evening, Goodsir added: “There’s no decision we take that we can’t reverse or we can’t say ‘that’s a dumb idea, let’s pull out of it.”
The issue of reducing production costs is widespread within the publishing industry. News Corp has centralised or outsourced much of its newspapers’ subbing to Pagemasters, while Mamamia has been advertising for subeditors in Bangladesh.
Tim Burrowes
Tim Burrowes founded Mumbrella in 2008. He worked on Mumbrella until 2021. At various points he was editor, content director and editor-at-large.
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As an ex-SMH sub, it was clear how important it was to have inhouse subs for the following reasons: local knowledge, to fact-check with journos, chief subs, the inhouse librarians, and, importantly, to have stories legalled inhouse where needed. I’m sure in the long-run we saved many potential law suits by getting the stories right (as humanly possible) inhouse.
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Fairfax outsourcing its quality control (for that is what subs do) was always a dumb idea redolent of the disastrous Fred Hilmer era. It was always.destined to fail. I’m It’s just surprised it’s taken Goodsir this long to work that out.
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The irony is the “World is fukt” error was made by in-house subs, and the issues of repeated pages was also an issue relating to in-house subbing (albeit the NZ sub hub). Outsourced subbing can and does work if experienced subs are employed -preferably in Australia – and paid a fair rate to do the work. Pagemasters successfully carried out the subbing for more than five years on the SMH and Age features sections but the contract was ended because it was cheaper to pay younger, less experienced people in NZ to do the work – work which, incidentally, had fewer checks and balances for them to meet and therefore had a lower required standard of subbing.
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It’s good news the SMH will be insourcing subediting but where will the subs come from? Will subs who received redundancy payments be re-employed?
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@ Ross Mitchell: Hopefully some former SMH subs, and from elsewhere from Fairfax e.g. the AFR will be re-employed. Many were casual subs and would have received little if any redundancy payout; those permanent staff who did receive a redundancy payment were banned from working at any job anywhere in Fairfax for two years after taking redundancy.
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Best news I have read all week…
We have the talent in Australia, and in-house at Fairfax to get the job done right.
Bring it back to what it was.
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Papers and magazines need good, experienced subs. I’m tired of our skills being shoved around like some cheap and disposable commodity. We do plenty to make publications and stories look good. Dumb idea is right. I see so many mistakes in the SMH it is laughable. Bring back high standards, Fairfax.
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Does this include ‘The Age’ – quality has been just as bad there as at the SMH? If so, it’s cause for rejoicing.
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Excellent news!
the subbing has been awful recently so it would be good to find a local model dare i say crowdsourced. bigger issue is after losing every major advertising category which newspapers could have led (cars jobs realestate video afl nrl finance etc along with all the new ad models from seo contextual richmedia wireless programmatic paidsocial etc) reality is can’t see fairfax or news affording proper pro subbing.. or weekday papers.. and so on.. the real people who should be d00ced are at board level.
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It’s easy to blame NZ staff but In-house Australian production staff members – yes, even experienced and well-paid ones – were 100% responsible for all the errors linked to in this article, including The Age’s Facebook post, the AFR’s ‘World is Fukt’ front page, and the repeated stories. Outsourced subs do not have access to a masthead’s social media accounts nor the authority to select stories for publication or send pages to print.
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I believe it may have been in a piece penned for this very website when the subs were first outsourced that said “The better a sub is, the less you notice the work they do”. This was spot on – and it’s clear that the work the outsourced subs are doing (or not doing) now has finally been noticed by management, even if the readers noticed years ago.
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Just as comment 11 by anon mentioned, all of the errors referred to in this article were created by the Australian production team not their counterparts in NZ. The repeated stories should also have been picked up by Australian production – NZ subs do not clear whole pages nor do they commission stories (ie two stories the same should never be in system). These kind of errors come of a time when there are fewer staff having to do more work and covering multiple platforms. And that’s happening on both sides of the ditch. Editors and the reader don’t see the “saves” picked up by subs – mistakes often created by writers forced to meet multiple deadlines a day in a highly competitive news world. At the end of the day it’s all about money. Newspaper bosses everywhere would do well to be honest about that.
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I doubt that Fairfax saved millions by sacking the subs. It had to pay redundancy (a month per year of service, and some of the subs had been there for 15, 20 or more years), and its initial contract with Pagemasters for the news pages was hugely expensive, despite the plunge in the quality of the subbing. Attempts by the SMH to cut the cost of Pagemasters led to all sorts of further compromises in quality, thus hastening the decline in sales of the paper. And I’ll bet all the calculations on how much they would save by moving the work to NZ were overtaken by the fall in the value of the Australian dollar against the NZ. I’d love to see an honest accounting of just how much has really been saved in return for the collapse in editorial quality control.
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I worked in business magazine publishing for five years with in-house subs who were amazing. How unbelievably dumb was it to outsource their expertise and, more importantly, their corporate knowledge. Fairfax has been amazing at trashing its brand, reputation, circulation, advertising sales, digital opportunities and just about everything else. How long before the ‘Fairfax Titanic’ sinks, or will the remaining crew left in the lifeboats be able to refloat it?
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Sydney, Auckland, Mumbai.
Quality costs. You get what you pay for.
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Another case of management clearing the decks?
Darren has no reason to maintain any outsourcing relationship because the “bonus” related to the redundancies has already been distributed to management. There is nothing in it for him or his management team.
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The return of subs? But this will deprive me of my cynical daily amusement at the Herald’s howlers. Only this morning we read “John Howard shoke hands with donors.” Then there are past classics:
“Myer chief apologises after wesbite fails”
“Secret archives reveal the Australia’s knowledge of Indonesian war crimes”
“Lose the chat-up lines and show some chivarly”
I think the record in a single story was:
“Meanwhile, two men were killed in a pane crash in Hastings yesterday… The Civil Aviation authority was now trawling trough the the wreckage to ascertain what happened… Bruce said he spotted the plane nose-down with it’s tail sticking out of a deep channel.”
Granted, outsourcing the proofreading robbed the paper of all credibility. But it made the Herald a wonderful joke-sheet!
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