At the launch of sourcingfocus.com in 2007 I was confronted by a – I thought at the time – rather over-zealous outsourcer. Such was his enthusiasm in all things outsourcing that he appeared hell-bent on showing me that anything and everything can and should be outsourced. He even tried to outsource me. Two years later, the portal is going well and growing rapidly. And I still have my job – I have not been outsourced…yet.

The subject of ‘media outsourcing’ is a nebulous concept and one that has been around for longer than most think. Articles of outrage from, presumably domestic journalists can be found online from as far back as 2004. Even back in those rather good economic times some canny or crazy publishers were looking at the opportunities for outsourcing core publishing functions. The outrage was real and valid but chatter about media outsourcing has since died down, precisely at a time when publishers are sacking staff, scraping for every penny they have available.

sourcingfocus.com’s interest in the issue was piqued last week with news that Channel 4 is outsourcing its HR and payroll administration to Logica. Though not a true media outsourcing function, it does at least indicate that the big guys, and those in financial trouble, are looking again to outsourcing as a viable business option. But what of the core functions such as content creation and editing? After the initial furore and five years of silence what has been happening in media outsourcing?

“You can outsource basically anything nowadays,” commented a source that wished to remain anonymous. “Media outsourcing can be a contentious area but there are loads of companies doing it now from basic BPO right up to high-end copywriting,” he said.

The main complaint over media outsourcing came from suggestions that the high-end processes such as editing and writing would all suddenly be shipped offshore resulting in reduced quality content. Perhaps owing to such complaints, the move towards outsourcing these functions has certainly not been a tidal wave in scale. But there is a growing outsourcing undercurrent in this area. In the last few years there have been new content outsourcing deals from Thompson Reuters, Time Warner, Pearson, the New York Times, The Daily Telegraph and even the Financial Times.

All these publishers have outsourced content creation in some capacity deriving various benefits such as cost reduction to the follow-the-sun capacity. For example, The Telegraph has outsourced its weekend supplements to Australia. Despite these deals, complaints over consistency and quality have not resurfaced, indicating that worries over this type of outsourcing may have been unfounded.

In 2004 Forrester predicted that 4,000 British media jobs would be off-shored for this kind of outsourcing over the following 10 years. Many more than this have been lost due to the ongoing recession and turmoil in the media sector and this has fuelled media outsourcing even more. Various domestic ‘content’ outsourcers have been created by this trend by taking on freelance journalists and creating almost ‘on-tap’ news services. Adfero is one that is taking a lead in this area.

“Everything is 24 hour now. Getting news content out there first is taking precedence over the depth of story. So many [organisations] are finding they can outsource and offshore news production and things like press release editing to cut costs whilst also giving them 24-hour news output and letting them focus on more in-depth editorial,” the source said.

But even though content production jobs are some of the most important in publishing, they are not always an organisation’s largest cost. Media organisations are also looking to cut costs in other areas. Cognizant is one company that has benefited from the media sector’s need to both cut costs and enhance operations due to increased competition. Interest in other areas of media outsourcing also appear to have surged as publishing companies attempt to adapt themselves to the digital age. IT outsourcing, the backbone for operating in the digital world, looks set to perform well in this area.

For example, one client of Cognizant’s wanted to create and monitise its online magazine presence. The company built a next-generation platform for the company which was fully able to be monitised whilst enabling them advanced tracking and reporting capabilities on the site back-end, further enhancing the saleability of the site’s offering.

Virtualisation and SaaS is also playing a big part in the growth of media outsourcing. The increasing availability of web-delivered applications and collaboration tools perfectly fits with the working style of many organisations and the 24 hour news culture. The Guardian for example, recently moved to using Google applications in favour of Microsoft. Likewise, few modern newsrooms are to be found without a wiki for organising the vast amounts of information they assimilate on a daily basis.

Industry observers predict that IT outsourcing is entering an entirely new phase, with vendors such as Microsoft, Google and Amazon increasingly dominating by offering cheaper and easier, commodity-based IT services. Gartner expects this market to grow by 43 percent this year to over US $2.7 billion.

While it has not been covered widely, the media outsourcing industry has clearly been growing steadily in the background. Though it is still a relatively niche area, the movement towards smaller outsourcing deals and ‘on tap’ provision of things like IT services seems likely to increase and make outsourcing viable for smaller players. Media companies are going through a period of rapid change and outsourcing looks set to play an increasingly large part in shaping the media company of the future.