Archive for July 1st, 2008

At BusinessWeek.

An Indian company will take over copy editing duties for some stories published in The Orange County Register and will handle page layout for a community newspaper at the company that owns the Pulitzer Prize-winning daily, the newspaper confirmed Tuesday.

Orange County Register Communications Inc. will begin a one-month trial with Mindworks Global Media at the end of June, said John Fabris, a deputy editor at the Register.

Mindworks’ Web site says the company is based outside New Delhi and provides “high-quality editorial and design services to global media firms … using top-end journalistic and design talent in India.”

…

Orange County Register Communications has struggled in recent months with circulation declines. The Register recently dropped from the third-largest newspaper in California to the fifth-largest, behind the Los Angeles Times, San Francisco Chronicle, San Diego Union-Tribune and Sacramento Bee.

I live in Orange County (but trying to get out as fast as I can), and the Orange County Register is just not a  good publication. Somehow outsourcing editorial duties to India I don’t see as improving their product.

Okay, it’s been around for a while, but it’s one of my favorite sites, and is a good example what happens when the content is interesting, and the community really knows how to promote, online and offline.

Yelp! is a social network-y review site (okay, it’s about adding friends and comments, but that’s how most social networking sites define it, whatever) that contains thousands of reviews, mostly of local businesses. Need a lousy hotel in Anchorage? It’s there! A great restaurant in Tempe to get drunk at? It’s there!

They have all kinds of nifty widgets to add to your blog.

One lament — how about opening up a Canadian site, yo. I have a bunch of restaurants to review up there.