Are Magazines Next?

Folio: The Magazine for Magazine Management, June 1, 2004 by Karen Holt

With its new design studio, the company will be able to perform many of the functions traditionally done in-house or outsourced to a domestic company, says Breault. That includes high-end creative work. She adds that the company expects to gain a publisher's confidence by starting out providing routine design and production work, which magazines have plenty of. "If you look at creating a directory, for example, what you do is very much take a style and develop scripts to lay that out and what you're doing is really merging data to a predefined layout," she says.

Boma and OfficeTiger reflect a pattern among companies building up a business in offshore magazine work. They have established themselves in other fields - marketing, advertising and financial analysis - that require skills that are transferable to magazine publishing, such as writing, researching, copyediting, layout and design. By the time these companies begin courting magazine publishers, they have not only built up a track record demonstrating those core skills, they have already set up their facilities and technology and their sales and customer services staff. Their ability to transfer their success from related fields into magazine publishing will likely encourage competitors to make the same jump.

But how much of it really translates to magazine work? Can a copy editor in India understand the nuances of style well enough to make the words flow smoothly in, say, a magazine for wine connoisseurs in California? Can a graphic designer in the Philippines create a pleasing look for an American hotel chain's custom publication? And what about the intangibles - the trust and communication that only comes from face-to-face contact.

"Most of the time, even among bigger accounts that we've gone after, you're really dealing with someone in a very personal one-on-one relationship," says Rob Sugar, president of Aurus Design in Silver Spring, Md. "So it matters to them that you're not that far away." Aurus designs and produces custom publications for organizations including the American Bus Association and the American Film Institute.

He says it would be logistically possible to perform the functions Aurus does offshore (he has clients in other states that he rarely sees in person), but he doubts overseas workers would have the right cultural sensibility for the job. "Knowing [a client] in a more intimate way is something that's very important. I think there's no substitute for understanding what their needs are."

Boma's employees in the Philippines ran into a cultural barrier when they began producing Fido Friendly. The concept of traveling with dogs was alien to the designers. Fong, who was born and raised in California, says it's his job to explain such cultural differences to his staff.

Journal Work Migrating Overseas

Professional journals such as Molecular Cancer Research (from the American Association of Cancer Research) and the APG Bulletin) from the American Association of Petroleum Geologists) are already flocking to offshore vendors. Just ask Inera, a Massachusetts company that sells editorial and production software to publishers. "We have one competitor and it's not another software product. It's outsourcing," says Ken Carson, Inera's vice president. In the last year and a half, the company has lost several big potential deals because publishers found that instead of investing in software, they could outsource work to India or the Philippines and still save up to 80 percent off what it would cost to do the work in-house. Outmatched on price, Inera tries to compete on quality, appealing to publishers who insist on the control of keeping the work in-house, says Carson.