Dirk Engelhardt und Goetz Hamann worry in Die Zeit that outsourcing is threatening the quality of the German press. I’d say yes and no.

Yes, replacing permanent contracts with temporary contracts on a massive scale (what outsourcing actually is) does reduce the journalists independence and is likely to increase the worlkload for many of them. There are areas in which this could possibly lead to weaker journalism.

But on the other hand, it could well turn out that the public is quite content with the cheaper version in many cases and that some people were having a cheap lunch before. I mean, there are quality newspapers in this country which seem to rely to large extent on unpaid interns for their local pages – without a significant reduction in quality, it seems.