An interview with Paul Cheesbrough, CTO of News Corp

Part 8 in a series of CTO Interviews

Recently I had the opportunity to sit down with CTOs from very different digital media companies to understand how they think about the role, what they have in common and where they differ in approach. You can read earlier interviews with the CTOs of Buzzfeed, Vice, Salon, Shutterstock, Digg and Hearst here.

Next up is Paul Cheesbrough, CTO of News Corp. Cheesbrough oversees the technologists in all of the News Corp businesses. I met with Paul in his offices in Manhattan, where we discussed how News Corp has changed its approach to technology since the company was split a year ago, what the company is doing to facilitate a culture of experimentation, sharing and collaboration across its businesses, and what the newsroom of the future might look like. News Corp is a member of NYC Media Lab.

We hear all the time that the pace of change in technology has sped up. How has that changed the job of the CTO in digital media?

We’ve gone from a period of time in publishing where there was very little change to a time where there is perpetual change. Consumer behavior is changing rapidly. That’s the thing that is causing our business to continually reinvent itself. Technology is highly strategic to the organization. As a technologist, that’s the best place to be: in a fast moving environment where you have to change your approach to keep up with and get ahead of the consumer, sustain the existing business and grow new revenue streams.

In some of the press coverage of the team you’ve built, it’s mentioned you’ve been successful at bringing in execs from places like Apple and Google. Is there more of a blending going on between tech and media these days?

If you look at the pure tech companies, they have awesome firepower in engineering and platform capabilities. What many of them are trying to do — Google, Apple, Facebook and even LinkedIn — is bridge into the content space in some shape or form. The opportunity that News Corp has is that we produce a lot of the content “crown jewels” these companies want. We have the opportunity to apply technology to our content, to be creative at the intersection of content and technology — there is no more exciting intersection for a technologist to be operating within.

For example, last year we hired Rachel Schutt as our Global Head of Data Science. When we showed her the depth of data around our content and what we’re attempting to do as a business, it was clear there are challenges that are different from what pure tech companies would see. For instance, how journalism thrives in the 21st century, how we create fantastic content experiences, how we commercialize content; these are challenges that people want to tackle every day.

The platform team is another example of that. We have hired a couple of people out of Amazon, for instance- their remit is to look at the IP we are generating and build a development community where we can build and trade tools between the businesses. These are pretty high order engineering challenges.

To top that off I’d say our executive management — from Rupert Murdoch and Robert Thomson down — have a very clear passion for the role of technology in all of our organizations. Keeping up with their curiosity in this space keeps us on our toes.

Is it possible to have a shared technological imagination across so many different businesses across the globe?

When we split the company in two, we used the opportunity to bring the teams from the US, Australia and the UK together, to hear their thoughts, challenges and pressures, and their ideas for the future. We used this process to build out a technology strategy focused on improved collaboration and sharing — and in some cases bringing together our platforms. Our approach to managing data, analytics, subscriptions, programmatic advertising, newsroom systems and video distribution are all areas where our businesses have worked together to align with technologies and partners.

At a product level, we’re focused on making sure we were able to hire the best creative and engineering expertise in the market. Ultimately, you have to have the best talent embedded in the businesses and this has its different challenges in different regions.

How do you bubble up innovations from the different regions and businesses?

We’ve tried to create cells of expertise, and we wire them together from a communications point of view. For instance next week we have a number of editorial and tech staff coming to New York to showcase their mobile applications, swap ideas, talk about the competition and apps and businesses that inspire them. The goal is to share that knowledge more effectively; and both I and the Chief Strategy Officer here at News Corp place a lot of emphasis on this.

What types of time horizons are you working with when thinking of how to incorporate new technologies into the business?

We take a longer term outlook at a strategy level. A simple example would be our migration to the cloud- we have 66 data centers and we are moving to just three over three years, leveraging Amazon, Google and Azure to build a smarter, faster infrastructure capability.

Then when it comes down to digital products we take a nearer-term view as well. It’s important that we take consumer feedback into account on an ongoing basis. We get inspired by talking to entrepreneurs and startups in New York, Silicon Valley and Asia. Every few months we visit with the VCs and startups; that’s something Robert Thomson, our CEO, and Rupert love to do.

Some companies have a Head of R&D or Innovation. We’ve done our best to make sure incorporating new technologies is in everyone’s DNA. For instance, Amazon released its new phone last month; we had a team at the Wall Street Journal working on it with Amazon to ensure that we were present on the device at the time of the launch.

How do you personally keep up to date on the latest?

I do two things. One is put my consumer hat on regularly and immerse myself in the latest devices and apps, go and talk to the companies off the back of that. For instance, I spent time with SnapChat recently. I’m not the average demographic, but I’m obsessed with how those companies operate and how consumers think about using those services. The other is getting ideas from the team. We are focused on hiring people who have their ear to the ground, are the best at what they do, and have great networks.

Do you have a vision- or visions- in your mind of what the newsroom of the future will look like?

When you publish a vision it tends to be out of date really quickly, but there are some key things. Data is an obvious one- the use of data in real time to inform and inspire journalism. The prevalence of more design and engineering skills in the newsroom as opposed to beside it or on the floor below. If you look at the future of what we produce- content and code- we will want people who are ambidextrous with both. The next question you can move on to is the physical layout and design of work spaces. We’ve been pretty progressive on that front. For instance, we recently redesigned our London newsrooms. The space is a canvas to think about different work flows. And, there are other technologies we are exploring. Recently we went to see the Oculus team. You start to think about storytelling using VR, the applicability of that to our businesses; it could be interesting.

A lot of businesses have slightly missed the point that digital success needs the whole organization to pull together. Hybrid teams have to tackle these issues and work together- you want a balanced team of content creators, commercial experts and technologists. Generally, I think the creative energy of these teams is what will help us figure out how to take the company into the future. Our goal is to hire and retain the best people and create the space for them to fulfill their potential.

Justin Hendrix is Executive Director of NYC Media Lab. Reach him at justin [dot] hendrix [at] nycmedialab [dot] org or follow him on Twitter @justinhendrix.