The Evolving Newsroom

This gave me a little kick of happiness. It’s a list of cloud-based services Telegraph Media Group in London is using, and it appears to be a longer list than when I was there (three+ years ago). I remember a time when external hosting was rather out of favour.

The following is from the GigaOm blog of Mathew Ingram (someone I enjoy following on Twitter: @mathewi).

A recent presentation by Toby Wright, chief technology officer at the Telegraph Media Group — one of the world’s oldest newspapers — suggests that they can take a tip from startups when it comes to being more efficient: namely, use cloud-computing services.

In his talk at the Cloud Computing World Forum in London, Wright described how the organization is using cloud services for a range of different functions (hat tip to Roy Greenslade for spotting this). The list includes:

• Google Apps — for email and collaboration tools (document sharing, etc.)
• Salesforce — to manage the newspaper’s reader subscriptions system
• SuccessFactor — for human resources management
• Disqus — for managing of online comments and forums
• Amazon EC2 — for hosting real-time analytics
• Ooyala — for hosting and distributing video content

The Telegraph CTO didn’t say exactly what kind of impact the move to cloud services has had in financial terms, but he did say that from now on, the newspaper plans to make all of its new business ventures cloud-based. The CTO said that the company has no interest even in managing servers that are hosted somewhere else, or what he called “virtual tin.” And according to a report at CIO.com, Wright said that he believed using cloud services would be more secure than managing them internally, because most cloud providers actually have more stringent security than the newspaper group does.

Ingram concludes that other newspapers should take a leaf out of Wright’s book. I agree.

Cloud-based services are obviously something we’re all about at allaboutthestory.com, which we see ultimately as a platform not only for buying and selling content but also for sharing, distribution and other aspects of content management.

Like Wright, we know there are all sorts of services that can be cheaper and more efficient to buy in from outside. Same goes for exploratory projects that aim to foster efficiencies, culture change and cost control. How about an internal marketplace where departments (web and print, features and commercial supplements, graphics and scribblers) find and trade content at real-world prices to help you minimise waste and keep your staff realistic about costs? Sure, you could build something yourself. Or you could get allaboutthestory.com to build or host it for you. Bet we could do it cheaper and more innovatively and without distracting your teams from other core projects.

Ingram notes that TMG, like most newspapers, doesn’t use the cloud for publishing its content “presumably because it sees this as too important to hand over to someone else, or because it can’t make the transition from the kind of legacy software that most modern newspapers use to publish their content.”

The trouble with the legacy software Ingram’s referring to is that lifecycles are so long it makes it impossible to innovate quickly. Generally a year or more will be spent defining the requirements for a new CMS and shopping for suppliers, then another couple of years for development (during which the supplier will take longer to deliver less than you agreed), and then a year of rollout and training and bug-fixing. So four years on you’ve got slightly less than you wanted five years ago. Hopeless.

That’s going to have to change. If there’s one thing I took away from the many hours I spent considering future newsroom workflows at TMG, it’s that news orgs need way more flexibility from their publishing systems than they have now. They need leaner systems that are easier to update, reconfigure and replace, that talk to each other, that are platform neutral, that are easy to use, that speak the language of the web.

A good part of the answer to that problem lies in the cloud.