Outsourcing Printing

The San Francisco Chronicle is outsourcing its printing. Terrific move, and I expect other papers to look hard at doing the same thing. It eliminates the high capital costs of buying presses, gets out of tough union contracts and gives a paper a chance to adjust its press run to best fit its market, rather than having to worry about what to do with excess press capacity.

Moreover, this is a tacit admission that the business is about gathering news and information—not about how it's distributed. In a world in which news organizations need to be diversifying to multiple distribution platforms (the Web, mobile devices, etc., in addition to the traditional channels), the Chronicle's move gets the paper out of the printing business. Very smart. This is the kind of out-of-the-box thinking that newspapers should be looking at to control costs and adapt to a changing environment, rather than randomly downsizing newsrooms.