Live global editorial production became a demonstrable reality when a team in Sydney started producing pages for London’s ‘Daily Telegraph’ this week.

The outsourcing development in which Telegraph Media is partnering AAP’s Pagemasters, follows local outsourcing services for APN News & Media and most recently Fairfax Media. The difference between this and the page-ready PDF-based services provided since the early 1990s, is that the Pagemasters teams are working live within their clients’ editorial systems.

“In effect, nothing leaves the newspaper’s offices while we produce native layout files which they can manipulate, change and correct themselves … and can see while we're doing it,” says Pagemasters managing director Bruce Davidson.

The technology varies: In the case of the ‘Telegraph’, a remote desktop application gives access to the DTI PageSpeed running in London; with Fairfax and APN New Zealand, it’s Atex’s familiar Cyber product.

“It’s totally and utterly seamless, with nothing really leaving Telegraph, Fairfax or APN … and that, I think is the best solution,” Davidson says.

Pagemasters, fully-owned by Australian Associated Press (AAP), itself owned primarily by News and Fairfax, has been handling wire service stockmarket, racing and TV guide information since 1991. From TV listings for the Melbourne ‘Herald-Sun’, the business has developed to providing material for “just about every newspaper in Australia”. Davidson says the page-ready element kicked off five or six years ago with TV magazines and entertainment, and then moved into the wire copy page-ready business, national and world news for regional papers. “In the case of APN, it allowed them to stick to their knitting and concentrate their own efforts on local news.”

A new – and initially controversial – development was APN New Zealand’s decision to outsource sub-editing to a new Pagemasters unit in Auckland. Currently 55 sub-editors produce about 1000 pages a week embracing “virtually all” of the ‘New Zealand Herald’, plus six regional dailies, the ‘Listener’ news magazine, Auckland community papers and the ‘Herald on Sunday’.

In October last year following an announcement that the metro publisher would shed 550 jobs, Pagemasters started providing design and editing services for Fairfax’s ‘Sydney Morning Herald’ and ‘The Age’ from a new unit in Brisbane. “It may have been sensitive at the time it's now become part of the furniture,” Davidson says. “We’re still ramping up the operation, with all the ‘Herald’ sections now being handled but more to take on with ‘The Age’.”

Davidson says the technology and communications systems mean you can operate anywhere you like: “People feel comfortable about being able to make a local call to the centre, but at the end of the day it doesn't make any difference. It's more about perception.”

He says the decision to site the Telegraph operation at the AAP offices in the Sydney suburb of Rhodes was a practical one: “We had available space, the infrastructure and back of house was already here.”

An outcome has been that Pagemasters now has centres in three major capitals … Melbourne – where the listing business was being handled, has a team of 11 sub-editors doing work for the regional papers – plus Sydney and Brisbane.

“All the operations are very collaborative, and we work together to come up with the best solutions,” Davidson says. “In all cases the model is that the decision making about what goes in is totally taken by the newspapers.”

DTI’s Asia-Pacific director David Page – who worked with the Telegraph Media site in the UK before returning to Australia – says the remote desktop application gives the Pagemasters team access to some of the servers in the TMG office running the DTI applications.

“They can view the screens remotely in Sydney, in a manner similar to the Software as a Service (SaaS) model we are in the process of deploying in the USA,” he says. And Page adds a report from London that page designers in Sydney have been “very complimentary” about the efficiency of the DTI system and how much they like working with it.

Auckland and Brisbane use the Cybergraphic-originated Atex system which is familiar to most sub-editors in the two countries, while a slightly different model is in use in Melbourne for PDF production.

The Victorian office also handles production of Adelaide’s ‘Independent Weekly’ using the browser-based Roxen system supplied by Melbourne-based agent APS. Layout is in Adobe InDesign, but by using the Roxen editorial portal, the Adelaide team can see the layout being produced live, and can intervene if there are problems such as a story not fitting. Davidson says that while liaison can take place by phone, it doesn’t happen very often as “we know what they want and they trust us”. This is an advantage of the Roxen system, which is used to submit copy, and can have online publishing facilities.

Meanwhile, as the Telegraph link-up – which arose following a TMG visit to Fairfax Media’s headquarters in Darling Island – gains pace, Davidson says he is ready to talk to any magazine or newspaper publishers who have similar ideas. “News agencies worldwide are looking at ways of expanding their services to their client base in an ever-changing industry,” he says. “You have to be always reacting to what clients may or may not want.”

The operation in New Zealand was the largest of its kind in the world when it started, and while some European newspapers outsource production – notably the O’Reilly-owned ‘Irish Independent’ to France – the ‘Telegraph’ is the first UK newspaper to have outsourced outside that country.

Davidson plays down the time-shift benefits of not having to employ journalists during unsocial hours – “most of this stuff would have been done on day shifts anyway” – but says a more real benefit is the ability to hand over material at the end of the day in London and have pages back in the morning.