Rajesh Kumar, a twenty-six-year-old with tight jeans, long black hair, and a gold earring, drags a small black-and-white image of a pointing butler’s glove across the flat screen of his Mac. He’s designing an advertisement for the Star Tribune, a newspaper that publishes halfway around the world. The simple ad is for a home-cleaning service run by a man named Mike whom Kumar has never met, a man who works in a place Kumar has never visited.

Minneapolis, after all, is more than seven thousand miles away from this clean, modern, twenty-five-thousand-square-foot office in Gurgaon, India—one of New Delhi’s exploding edge cities where wealthy multinational corporations, massive outsourcing outfits, and swanky shopping malls share space with destitute Indians and feral animals struggling to survive.

Kumar works for Express KCS, an Indian back-office company that designs and produces advertisements for more than one hundred U.S. publications, many of them MediaNews Group papers like the San Jose Mercury News and The Oakland Tribune. Work orders for hundreds of ads pop up in Express KCS’s system each day, and teams typically turn around each project within a matter of hours. Two huge diesel generators and three Internet service providers ensure that the Gurgaon office is connected to its U.S. clients around the clock. “It works,” says Mary Evans, director of advertising operations for the Mercury News. “You turn things in in the evening, and chances are you’re going to have a proof in the morning.”

As newspapers across the U.S. slash budgets and lay off staff, more and more are outsourcing jobs in their advertising and circulation departments. Companies like Express KCS are booming, says its coo, Tariq Husain, largely because they can save the advertising production department of a typical U.S. newspaper 30 to 50 percent a year. Less than...

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