As the U.S. newspaper industry has struggled to cope with the advertising market downturn, circulation slumps and migration of print readers to online, publishers are increasingly looking at offshoring work to India as a way to cut costs, in addition to other cost-cutting measures, such as reducing staff and streamlining production and resources, a new report by Research and Markets shows.

“This trend is set to gain traction in the next few years,” the summary of “Offshoring by U.S. Newspaper Publishers” report states.

Offshoring ad production services to India is one of the most popular moves, as it “provides maximum leverage for ad production services since this is easier to provide from India,” the report's summary states.

Offshoring is currently done mostly by Tier 1 publishers, and outsourced work is mostly ad production. “However, as offshoring matures, the Tier 2 and Tier 3 publishers will offshore a wider range of services to India,” said Arun Jethmalani, CEO of ValueNotes, the Research and Markets report states.

The offshore vendor market in India is “at a nascent stage with only a handful of vendors in India actively focusing on the newspaper segment,” with Affinity Express, Express KCS, 2AdPro and Mindworks Global competing as top offshoring firms, according to Research and Markets.

“We expect Indian offshore revenues from the global newspaper market to reach (US)$120 m(illion) by 2012. However the vendors need to build client confidence in terms of delivering consistently good quality of output and quick turnaround,” Jaslene Bawa, ValueNotes analyst, stated in the summary.