The Sun Never Sets... on the Orange County Register

The English language has, arguably speaking, been one of Great Britain's most prolific and resilient exports. Now it has become the basis for a new kind of international trade. That, along with cost pressures and reliable networks made the following virtually inevitable.

An Indian company will take over copy editing duties for some stories published in The Orange County Register and will handle page layout for a community newspaper at the company that owns the Pulitzer Prize-winning daily, the newspaper confirmed Tuesday.

Orange County Register Communications Inc. will begin a one-month trial with Mindworks Global Media at the end of June, said John Fabris, a deputy editor at the Register.

Mindworks' Web site says the company is based outside New Delhi and provides "high-quality editorial and design services to global media firms ... using top-end journalistic and design talent in India."

Substituting 'z's for the new copy editors' instinctual 's's in words like 'institutionalized' won't be enough. As the saying goes: Britain and America are two countries separated by a common language. Perhaps more so with the other former colonies.

It will be interesting to see how they separate pure copy editing from tasks like fact-checking, local context, style and cultural nuance -- a lesson Dell and others learned the hard way, as faraway call center personnel (perfectly nice and perfectly competent) just didn't 'click' with their U.S. callers for a host of subtle reasons.

One demographic irony: in the not-so-distant future, the Indians may lose out to the Mexicans for the OC's outsourcing contract.

Comments

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Using local mass media tools might help to this process. If people are more aware of their environment, that will be great.