A visit to New Zealand’s biggest sub-hub

Two rows of empty cubicles in the New Zealand Herald’s newsroom in central Auckland offer visible testimony to the effect of outsourcing a major piece of the newspaper’s production.

Until the fall of 2007, the desks were full of copy editors and page designers. Since then, that function has been performed by editors working 10 km away in the Auckland suburb of Ellerslie. In a spacious newsroom adjoining Herald’s printing plant, a corps of 58 editors turns out more than 1,000 pages a week for the Herald and nine other newspapers.

In Britain, Australia and New Zealand, copy editors are called sub-editors. Their duties – choosing and editing stories, writing headlines and designing pages – are known as subbing. Hence, a centralized subbing operation is a sub-hub.

The Ellerslie operation is operated by Pagemasters, a subsidiary of the Australian Associated Press. It contracts with APN News and Media, to produce pages for the Herald and its sister papers across the North Island. The Herald retains some in-house subs to produce its weekly entertainment section and weekend magazine.

George Butler (above right), formerly the news editor of the Herald, oversees the Pagemasters operation. He was initially skeptical of the concept but was won over by the company’s commitment to cut costs without reducing quality. Antony Phillips, who oversaw the sub-hub before becoming editor of APN’s Hawke’s Bay Today earlier this year, described Butler as “the poacher turned gamekeeper.”

When I visited on a recent Friday morning, about 20 subs were at work in the spacious newsroom. The first editors, who had arrived at 4:30 a.m. to finish work on several of the provincial dailies, were nearing the end of their shifts. Others were working on pages for the following day. Butler said the relative calm was deceptive. “They’re like swans on a lake – calm on the surface and wild panic underneath,” he said.

The staff has been relatively stable; only one person has left since Butler took over as managing editor in January. That undoubtedly contributes to the consistency and quality of the system.

At mid-day a dozen subs would arrive to start work on the New Zealand Herald; many were Herald subs who simply transferred to Pagemasters. Others are newcomers to editing, coming from magazines and regional papers. One is a former teacher; two are recent graduates of Auckland University of Technology’s journalism programme.

And I was surprised to discover an American, Nik Dirga (above left). Nik worked at several U.S. newspapers, including the News Review of Roseburg, Oregon, before moving to New Zealand.

At many U.S. newspapers, copy editors’ workload is uneven – slow at the beginning of a shift, a flurry of frenzied activity as the deadline approaches, and often coasting after the deadline passes. Sub-hubs seek to even out the work flow. That requires careful scheduling and sharing of duties. A computer monitor (left) shows the number of stories awaiting editing for each newspaper.

Butler carefully monitors the centre’s weekly output. So far the results are promising: At the Herald, a sub-editor produced an average of 1.5 pages per day. Here, the daily output is more than double that pace, 3.7 pages per editor. He insists that quality has been consistent with what the individual papers enjoyed before, and Nik agreed. “I do think PM generally lifts the quality of non-local coverage to a higher standard with our copy-tasting [story selection] of news, which I've been heavily involved in.”

The subs are in constant contact with editors at the client papers by phone, e-mail and through story lists shared over a common editing and pagination system. Still, it would be hard for me to get used to having stories edited across town (in the case of the Herald) or hundreds of kilometers away (in the case of two of the smaller APN dailies at the south end of the North Island). I asked Nik whether he thought sub-hubs would work in the United States.

I've been asked this before and am unsure ... The biggest difference is simply the scale -- all of NZ is the population of the San Francisco Bay Area alone so centralizing works better here. I have trouble seeing how you could pull something like Pagemasters off on a national scale in a country the size of the US, but on a more regional/market level it could definitely work, done right.

Along those lines, Media General, which owns several newspapers in the southeastern United States, announced in April it would centralize copy-editing and page design for its three largest dailies. And Nik says Gannett has been sharing world news copy from USA Today with some of its sister papers.

APN also “in-sources” subbing for many of its community weeklies to a much smaller hub in Tauranga. I’ll provide more details about that arrangement in a future post.