Dean Singleton, head of the MediaNews chain, made news back in October when he suggested his company might outsource some newsroom jobs to India, where the company already does pre-press and ad-building work. Now it appears Singleton has backed down from that idea. He tells the Denver alt-weekly Westword:

“We’ve explored outsourcing copy editing and page makeup in India, too, but we probably won’t do that. I think we’re finding we can consolidate within our newspapers and get the same savings we can offshore. We probably won’t put any news operations there — and we weren’t talking about reporting and editing. We were talking about copy editing and page design, and I think we’ve found we can do it just as well ourselves here.

“Would we do it if it made a lot of sense?” he asks. “Sure we would. It doesn’t mean we’re going to — but we’re not alone in thinking about it. I happened to be the one giving the speech, but virtually every newspaper company in America is exploring the same thing.”