CUNY Business Model Presentations: Daily Telegraph - "Do what you do best and outsource the rest"

At the Cuny School of Journalism presentations on New Business Models, the Daily Telegraph's Digital Director, Edward Roussel, quoted Management Guru Tom Peters saying "Do what you do best, and outsource the rest."

Roussel believes that outsourcing is not an issue and that newspapers now need to target their resources better, ie, newspapers need to invest in their premium products and make cut backs in the less specialised areas.

Looking at the structure in the newsroom, Roussel identifies three strands:

* Original content - the premium product.
* Repurposed content - rewritten wire stories.
* AP copy and so forth.

Roussel called for more investment in original content, to make their premium product even better, but calls for the rewriting and AP area to be outsourced. Roussel said outsourcing is not an issue, using the example of recent work that the Daily Telegraph has done with the UK TV news organisation ITN for its online videos, he points out that ITN are frankly better at it. This is another one of Roussel's key points, he believes that outsourcing organisations frequently do the job a lot better than newspapers - as with ITN and video content - as well as cheaper.

Roussel looked at the expense of running newspapers, and sites the figure that 60% of newspaper costs are in production and calls for a cuts in costs here, but not in the "premium product."

Roussel also said, people want to lift the revenue to reach the old level achieved by newspapers but said, "you probably can't"