Citation: Örnebring, Henrik & Ferrer Conill, Raul (2016). Outsourcing newswork. In Witschge, T, Anderson, C.W., Domingo, D. & Hermida, A. (eds), The Sage Handbook of Digital Journalism, 207-221. Sage Publications Ltd. Pre-print version Chapter 14 Outsourcing Newswork Henrik Örnebring and Raul Ferrer Conill [p. 207 ] Introduction Outsourcing refers to the contracting out of previously internal business processes to a third party (Grossman and Helpman, 2005; Hätönen and Eriksson, 2009). The practice is common in many business sectors and spans outsourcing one specific procedure to a local partner, to outsourcing several processes to countries far away from the core business (so-called offshore outsourcing or just offshoring; Grossman and Rossi-Hansberg, 2011). In the business literature outsourcing is generally viewed in a positive light as it allows companies to focus on their core activities (Barrar and Gervais, 2006; Gilley and Rasheed, 2000), but there is also a wide-ranging literature outside of the applied business field that adopts a very critical perspective on outsourcing (Kalleberg, 2009; Klein, 2000; Standing, 2011). Outsourcing has been linked to circumvention of labor regulation (Benner, 2002; Burkholder, 2006), exploitation and wage inequality (Feenstra and Hanson, 1996), poor job safety (Mayhew and Quinlan, 1999; Quinlan and Bohle, 2008), and anti-union practices (Noronha and D’Cruz, 2006), for example. In the first decade of the twenty-first century, several cases of outsourcing in the news business have gained wider public attention. In these cases, what has been viewed as controversial is not the safety or the low salaries of the outsourced newsworkers, but rather the