MediaNews Group, owner of most of the Bay Area’s daily newspapers, says centralizing copy editing at one location for an entire region is an example of how the company is able to cut costs and become more profitable. “Why does every newspaper need copy editors? In this day and age, I think copy-editing can be done centrally for several newspapers,” company President Jody Lodovic tells Bloomberg News. But the company’s centralized copy desk in the Bay Area, located in Pleasanton, has been accused of making embarrassing errors because editors weren’t familiar with the towns where they publish newspapers.
The Bloomberg story reports on the eight-page memo chief executive Dean Singleton (posted here yesterday) sent employees in which he calls for increasing the company’s percentage of Internet sales from the current 7 percent of total revenues to 20 percent by 2012. In an interview with Bloomberg, Lodovic said that to achieve that, Media News will create Web sites separate from its 57 daily newspapers to attract younger readers.