In the late 1980s, Taco Bell, a fast-food chain then owned by the beverage giant PepsiCo, hit upon a supply-chain strategy that would have a profound impact on the global Quick Service Restaurant (QSR) industry.

Under what was dubbed the K-Minus programme , Taco Bell eliminated the kitchen from its restaurants. The food, normally at the core of a restaurant business, was outsourced to vendors so that Taco Bell could save on labour cost, overheads and retail space, to focus fully on delighting the customers by serving them re-heated fajitas. Today, most fast food chains around the world and in India employ the K-Minus model.

This pollen from the fast-food business has fertilised a new breed of digital-media products that have eagerly embraced newsrooms without journalists as part of the J-minus model.

In the conventional world of print media, opinions are still considered to be useful at the third or fourth stage of current affairs coverage. First comes the immediate “what happened,” followed by the surrounding facts and relevant data, and then the opinion or column, which is ideally an analytical piece of writing—a writer’s opinion is important, but that opinion needs to be based on qualitative analysis and insight.

The emerging digital-content model, however, is a simple marriage between new age tweets and old letters to the editor, with the resultant product providing outrage ammunition for the barrackers on social media. Such opinion by its nature is free, and such opinion writers take the sweat out of editing and planning—you calendarise the pipeline, with X’s column due at Y hour on Z date. There is no need for editors who are capable of spotting interesting leads, commissioning them, and working with field reporters and photographers to chase down the more unwieldy stories.