Extensive network

News Corp Australia is the nation’s largest media company with significant digital and newspaper interests including some 140 daily, Sunday, weekly, and community newspapers. Flagship titles such as The Australian, Sydney’s Daily Telegraph, Brisbane’s Courier-Mail, Melbourne’s Herald Sun, the Adelaide Advertiser and the Hobart Mercury are at the apex of a vast network of publications including nearly 100 free weekly community newspapers and a suite of regional dailies such as The Cairns Post, the Townsville Bulletin, the Geelong Advertiser, the NT News and the Gold Coast Bulletin.

THINKING BIG

News Corp required a solution for the delivery of real-time production journalism for its community and regional newspapers with no loss of quality but at a price that would allow it to more effectively use its resources on digital initiatives, including the rapid rollout of a multi-million dollar digital editing suite. The high fixed cost associated with in-house production journalism was no longer adding up. Handing over the critical role of subediting journalists’ work to a third party is a decision not taken lightly so News resolved to collaborate with Pagemasters on a major change of process to the sub-editing of more than 8000 stories a week.

A FLEXIBLE SOLUTION

To answer New Corp’s ambitious request, Pagemasters pioneered a groundbreaking flexible production model powered by a team of experienced production journalists, many working remotely from their own homes around Australia. At the heart of this web of skilled journalists able to rewrite stories, fashion attention-grabbing headlines, check for errors of fact and alert editors to legal issues would be small hubs of chief sub-editors in Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane. Our journalists would work in News Corp’s editorial system in real time, allowing editors to see what was being done to their stories as it happened. News Corp largely exited traditional production journalism for the majority of its Australian titles as Pagemasters seamlessly took over the work. Pagemasters’ flexible production model is also used by News Corp for the design and sub-editing of its advertising and commercial features in Australia.