Copyediting? Ship the Work Out to India

In a squat, gray building in Noida, a leading outsourcing destination 15 miles from New Delhi, is the headquarters of Mindworks Global Media. Here, 90 young men and women peer into their computers, editing copy, designing and laying out pages, and even reporting over the phone. Mindworks isn't a new publication. It's a company to which media groups in Asia, Europe, and the U.S.—including the Miami Herald and South China Morning Post—outsource work that journalists and copyeditors usually do. The Mindworks staff works two to three shifts a day, seven days a week. Tony Joseph, 46, an editor-turned-entrepreneur, is Mindworks' founder and chief executive. He sometimes drops by at 6 a.m. to see his employees, just when U.S. clients are putting their papers to bed.

Mindworks has been handling outsourcing assignments from non-Indian publishers for four years. It expects plenty more business as the cost-cutting in U.S. and European print media grinds on. Some Western publishers do their outsourcing in-house—Thomson Reuters (TRI), for instance, has moved basic Wall Street reporting on U.S., European, and Gulf equities to a new bureau in Bangalore. But other media companies prefer to outsource to the Indians directly. On June 24, Mindworks made global headlines when the Associated Press reported that the company had taken on copyediting and layout work for a couple of publications owned by the California media publishing group Orange County Register Communications.

Mindworks' Joseph, who was born and bred in Kerala, has spent most of his working career in New Delhi in senior editing positions at such leading India papers and magazines as Economic Times, Business Standard, and BusinessWorld. Now he lives in New York to be close to his clients and travels to India every quarter. He wouldn't divulge names or details about his clients, but he says Mindworks has eight from the publishing industry in all. The Orange County Register is the latest. A deputy editor at the Register says that Orange County's outsourcing to Mindworks "will be a one-month trial" for the service of laying out pages for one of its community papers and of copyediting stories for the flagship Register.

Markets in Flux

The U.S. is a new market for Mindworks, which got its first American client last year. "The U.S. is the world's biggest media market, and the business there is changing rapidly," says Joseph. "For us, the greatest opportunity for creativity and growth is in markets where there's a lot of flux and everything is open for reconfiguration." Indeed, U.S. publications have been plagued by declining print readership and advertising as readers keep switching to online media. Outsourcing work to India helps keep publications in business. "It helps them improve efficiencies in editorial packaging and reallocate resources to reporting and writing," Joseph says. Mindworks claims that it helps publications cut costs 35% to 40%.

Mindworks didn't start out with foreign clients. It began locally, publishing magazines for such companies as Bharti Airtel (BRTI.BO), India's largest telecom provider. At the height of the technology outsourcing boom in 2004, Mindworks got an assignment from a British airline magazine.

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