Copy-Editing and Page Design, Done Far From the Hometown.

By this fall, readers who pick up their local newspapers in Richmond or Tampa will be seeing articles that have been edited and laid out by people more than 700 miles away. Media General, owner of a chain of Southern newspapers, said last week that it would consolidate the copy-editing and page design for its three biggest papers, The Richmond Times-Dispatch in Virginia, The Tampa Tribune in Florida and The Winston-Salem Journal in North Carolina. It is already in the process of combining those functions for many of its smaller papers. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]