“Do what you do best and outsource the rest”: that’s the new business model at Telegraph Media Group, which is outsourcing the editing and page layout of several weekly sections of The Daily Telegraph and The Sunday Telegraph to Sydney-based Pagemasters, a subsidiary of the Australian Press Association. As smh.com.au reports, Telegraph sections including motoring and travel are already being assembled in Sydney and emailed back to be printed at News International’s hi-tech Broxbourne printing plant in Hertfordshire, where TMG began printing last autumn. theage.com.au says the deal covers 150 pages a week and that Pagemasters have had enquiries from the US, Europe and UK publishers about their services. TMG shaved 14 percent of its editorial costs in November by axing 50 jobs, including many subeditors, and has stopped employing casual and freelance subs.

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So TMG has moved from a traditional publisher - which part-owned a London printing plant, employed scores of subeditors and spent a lot of time and money physically creating and distributing its products - to a content producer with partnerships in almost every area… much like a TV company that employs other broadcasters and producers to make content for its channels and technology partners to make it happen, the Telegraph is saving money through deals with a range of companies. As TMG digital director Ed Roussel put its, in a comment on Jeff Jarvis’s blog, “ITN creates our video content, providing quality and value that we would struggle to generate internally; Brightcove handles our video distribution; Google (NSDQ: GOOG) powers our search; Escenic provides our web publishing tool; we use software developers in Bulgaria and India.”

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