Management made a decision to save the company money by outsourcing our jobs.

Here’s what it cost us.

This is a story about choices and consequences. Cause and effect. Action and reaction.

In early 2017, management at The Dallas Morning News notified the copy desk it would lay off employees and then outsource page design to a third party in Austin. Management forced copy/news desk editors who wished to remain on staff to interview for the jobs the company planned to keep. 

A dozen copy editor and news editor positions were eliminated from the news and sports desks. A few people decided not to go through this process and instead retired or left for other jobs. The GateHouse restructuring left the desks with far fewer workers than before.

We have no doubt this saved the company a lot of money. The savings were mostly in salaries and benefits from the people laid off, according to management.

Readers didn’t notice a difference between our workers designing the paper and GateHouse designing. We made sure of it. 

But it cost us. 

Even with our help, GateHouse designers still couldn’t create a product that came close to meeting our high standards. 

If we had let our readers see how GateHouse designed our pages in the beginning, they would not have recognized The Dallas Morning News. But we're proud of our paper, the details and style and quality that had earned us honors, awards and marks of distinction throughout the nation.

Sometimes, if our copy editor’s headline didn’t fit, the GateHouse designer would just cut off the last word. Sometimes the headline changes they made inserted errors and flipped the meaning. Once, several inches went missing from the middle of a story. They didn’t take the time or pay enough attention to notice those things. The contractors 200 miles away laying out the paper we used to design just couldn't do the job we needed them to do. They weren't invested and committed to The Dallas Morning News as we are.

Management’s decision to outsource created an inefficient system by marrying two incompatible computer programs that could not communicate directly with each other. It was like we were speaking English and the GateHouse designers were speaking Russian. 

We even had to move up our deadlines to give ourselves more time to account for the delays in communication. Even the smallest fix took several minutes to correct. 

During our time contracted with GateHouse, our copy desk frequently missed typeset deadline because we were waiting for fixes so our readers wouldn’t see a difference. Before outsourcing, we rarely missed deadline.

For GateHouse, building a newspaper was like an assembly line. Quantity over quality is what mattered to them; news judgment was also irrelevant or beyond their skill set. Their designers — who designed pages for other regional papers on the same days as ours — could not spend the time making their work immaculate. Not the way we do. 

For us, creating the newspaper is our pride and joy. It’s an art and a science. It’s a privilege and a duty.

 If management had come to us in 2017 and asked us to do this job with fewer people, we would have done it. Done it without bringing in a third party. Done it without a contract. Done it because our commitment to quality is a sacred code we have with our readers. They pay for quality local journalism. And we must deliver every single day.  

Management made a choice. We were left to deal with its consequences. 

The Dallas Morning News is part of the oldest continuously operated business in Texas and the state’s leading newspaper. Proudly, we are the first major newspaper newsroom in the state to unionize in the modern era.

The Dallas News Guild covers more than 130 journalists across all departments of the newsroom, including reporters, columnists, data journalists, copy editors, librarians, web producers, audio producers, page designers, photographers and videographers. Eligible newsroom workers voted in October by a margin of over 75% to form a union.

Keep up with our bargaining efforts on Instagram and Twitter — @DallasNewsGuild — and at the NEWS tab at DallasNewsGuild.org.

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