News UK Chief Operating Officer Chris Taylor speaks to Computing magazine about his role in ‘future proofing’ the company by re-architecting key newsroom systems. 

How COO Chris Taylor future-proofed News UK

By Sooraj Shah, published February 11, 2015

Chris Taylor's rise to prominence at News UK has been impressive. He joined the firm in 2011 as director of enterprise technologies, before becoming CIO in September 2012. And then, in a shift that is becoming more common, Taylor was promoted to COO in June 2013.

That means he now not only heads up the department that looks after everything from desktop support to data centres, as well as major project delivery, digital product management and development, but he also oversees the operations side of the firm, the planning, physical printing and the distribution and delivery of newspapers.

A £30m three-year programme dubbed Newsroom 360 involved taking the tools, practices, processes, and in some cases the organisational structures within the newsrooms of The Sun, The Timesand The Sunday Times, and re-engineering them from the ground up, with a view to making them work as efficiently as possible.As COO, Taylor has recently led three major projects to modernise News UK's technology and processes.

Taylor says that the idea was to make the newsrooms future proof.

The firm deployed a bespoke version of EidosMedia's Méthode publishing platform and OpenText's content hub, after a formal selection process. Given the size of the deal, EidosMedia was happy to customise its system to better suit News UK's requirements, as Taylor explains.

"We are the largest news media production company in the country and probably towards the largest in Europe, and as a consequence we have a lot of sway with roadmaps with some of these companies.

"If you take Méthode for example, it is also used by the Wall Street Journalwhich is owned by News Corp, as we are, and it is also used by News Corp Australia, so that's a huge amount of positive influence [from our side].

"At our behest, for The Sun, EidosMedia built quite intelligent graphic capabilities that you could only find on [Adobe] Photoshop, directly into their system, precisely to make our own processes quicker. So even if there aren't a huge number of vendors to choose from in this space, if you set your relationship with the right vendor in the right way, you can add those capabilities without having to have off-the-shelf options to choose from."

Taylor explains that the project was more than just a technology implementation.

"It is an equal measure of re-equipping systems and a comprehensive business change programme," he says.

A key element was a training programme for senior journalists to help them move from a "print first" process to one where they manipulate copy and multimedia into different channels in different ways at the same time. For example, a story is often now written in short form for smartphones, as well in long form for devices with bigger screens such as laptops.

"The programme saw us re-architect our newsroom systems, our practices and even the way our journalists think about the product," Taylor explains, adding that the project involved the "single biggest change in terms of technology practices and operations within the last three years".

Putting in a paywall

Another major project, which began several years ago, was the implementation of a subscription barrier.

"The subscription management element of it – the customer management, subscription billing, call centre management and the fulfilment and permissions – are all done on a Salesforce.com stack, which is heavily customised for our specific requirements," Taylor says.

But the technology behind the paywall itself is entirely bespoke.

"It's something we built in-house to cater for our particular needs," Taylor says.

Initially, the company used an off-the-shelf product from Atipon eRights, but Taylor says that the solution was "very expensive" and News UK "was not happy with it". So the company developed its own system and has since used it for The Sun, The Times and The Sunday Times.

The subscription system generates a lot of data about readers, and News UK it taking steps to better harness this information in order to get valuable commercial insights.

"We have a dedicated business intelligence team here who manage this, run by the former Telefonica BI head, and we have a project kicking off to refresh some of the systems we use to support that," Taylor says.

The company has had a Hadoop data platform in place for a few years now which it uses to analyse the clickstreams of all of its products. This information is used to steer product decisions and targeted advertising, and gives the firm potential for content targeting.

"We don't do content targeting because we believe in the idea of the edited edition but we have the ability to do so," he says.

Taylor says the data is kept in a data warehouse that is "very tightly managed" because some of it is sensitive and also because News UK members are paying for their subscriptions. "We have to treat it with a degree of caution," he says.

He claims the firm doesn't use "random web-like retargeting ads" but instead targets a particular audience on smartphones, tablets and laptops.

"So BMW could take an ad for the 3-series in the newspaper and we translate that in the tablet version where we know who you are, and tailor it so that for a younger man the advert could be a Z4 or an M3, while if it is a 60-year-old woman we might offer her an advert for an X1," he says.

But while the company is finding out more about its readers than ever before, Taylor emphasises that the data has to be used in a way that "would offer additional value to the reader".

Getting others onside in the war for talent

Although Taylor is content with the talent he has at his disposal, he believes that his organisation, like others in London, are engaged in "a real war of digital talent", adding that this is especially the case in the app development space.

"We have our own capabilities internally, but the way we have tackled this is instead of using day-rate contractors, which a lot of people do - and indeed we did a couple of years ago – we have cultivated relationships with a couple of carefully selected agencies in Soho that we work with for our app development - the main being The App Business," he explains.

"These agencies understand how we work and our products and titles, our deployment process and how our infrastructure is configured - it's all on Amazon so it's pretty straightforward," he says.

"It means that we can use those people as an extension of our own organisation but without having to fight the challenge that a lot of other large companies have of trying to attract and hold permanent staff," he adds.

News UK has a permanent security team and a CISO who works under Taylor, but the news publisher, like many other organisations, is keen to raise awareness of cyber security across the whole of the company.

"Four years ago, The Sun website was defaced, and that was the point where we changed our attitude to cyber security, and with the recent history of the company and the high profile nature of our brands, we think it is increasingly important for us to be on the front foot," Taylor says.

The new stance on cyber security has seen an investment in a number of monitoring and detection tools, the introduction of "a cyber security day" to educate staff and two-factor authentication across every single employees' email and social media accounts.

News UK also has a partnership with Dell Secureworks to monitor unusual events.

"It has been pretty effective so far, but in this day and age you can never be completely secure, you can only do the best you can to try to protect your environment and I think the weakest link remains human beings, and that's why we think awareness is such a big thing," he says.