Expansion
Expansion is the operative word these days at Schlager Group. We’ve already expanded by establishing our own reference imprint, our new Milestone Documents series is in expansion mode, and now our staff size is expanding, too. We’re in the midst of soliciting resumes and interviewing candidates for two new positions, Editorial Assistant and Staff Copy Editor, and we have more growth planned for later in the year. To mark the beginning of this growth phase, we’ve established an Employment page on our corporate Web site that I think nicely summarizes what we’re about and what kind of people we’d like to hire.
The decision to begin handling some of our copy editing in house rather than with freelance editors has been a long time in coming. Many of the larger reference houses always used to do all of their copy editing in house, but this practice fell out of favor in the past two decades as companies realized that it was cheaper to outsource this task to freelancers. We too have followed the outsourcing practice for the past decade, but lately we are finding it more and more difficult to identify and retain freelance editors who can give us the quality we need at the pace we desire. So we have decided to bite the bullet and begin to bring some of this work in house, where we can properly train and direct the folks who edit and fact-check our material.
In any event, it’s exciting (and only a little scary) to be expanding when so much of the rest of the economy seems to be contracting. We are lucky to be a part of the thriving information industry.