Confirmed: Citizen-Times begins out-sourcing newspaper production to India

As I first blogged here, the Asheville Citizen-Times has begun the process of outsourcing ad production to India. This is nothing new for the newspaper’s owner, Gannett. Nobody in Asheville will be losing their jobs — at least not right away.

I reported the rumors, then received this confirmation from an insider:

The ad services and creative departments at the Asheville Citizen-Times were informed that the paper will begin testing the services of 2AdPro in India in June. They expect to go live in August.

The employees were told that no one would be losing their jobs, that this would free the production and spec designers from the more mundane work and they’d be better able to focus their creativity.

They were told Tuesday following the holiday and the ad director said that she’d be telling the sales reps the following day. According to ad reps that did not happen. There have been some horrified reactions when the information was “leaked.”

In other Citizen-Times news, everybody’s still waiting to see who will be named editor of the newspaper following the departure of Susan Ihne. The newspaper has yet to publicly acknowledge what’s happening on that front. But Ashvegas blogged the hell out of it.

Meantime, the newspaper’s head of marketing, Luann Labedz, is moving on to work as publisher of Creative Loafing in Atlanta. And in another top personnel change coming down the pike, editorial page editor Joy Franklin will be retiring in November. Change, change, change.