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MADHAV CHINNAPPA: Hi, everybody.
Thanks for joining us today for this Google Cloud
virtual fireside chat.
I'm Madhav Chinnappa.
I'm Director of News Ecosystem Development
and I work on our Google News Initiative.
I'm thrilled to be joined by Chris Taylor, the Chief
Operating Officer for "The Telegraph,"
for this virtual fireside chat.
Welcome, Chris.
CHRIS TAYLOR: Lovely to be here.
Thanks for having me.
MADHAV CHINNAPPA: Those of us in the UK
all know about "The Telegraph."
But for those of us further afield,
could you tell us a bit more about "The Telegraph"
and also your role as COO there?
CHRIS TAYLOR: Yeah, for sure.
"The Telegraph" is one of the oldest and leading premium
newspaper companies in the UK.
A very long history going back more than 160 years,
and has been right at the center of a lot of pivotal events
in UK and world history over that time.
These days, of course, "The Telegraph"
is much more than a newspaper.
The newspaper is still very important to us,
but we also have a very substantial digital presence.
A long history of innovation.
First newspaper in the UK online back
in the early 1990s, and today, a very focused
digital subscriptions strategy.
My role as chief operating officer
composes a lot of different things, actually.
The majority of my background is in tech and digital product
in media.
It's where I spend most of my career.
I'm responsible for those things here at "The Telegraph,"
but I also look after broader business operations,
including things like the print, production, and distribution
of the newspaper itself.
MADHAV CHINNAPPA: And to better understand
the role of technology and Google Cloud
at "The Telegraph," could you give us
a couple of examples of the ways that Google Cloud
is helping "The Telegraph?"
CHRIS TAYLOR: Yeah, so it's really interesting.
"The Telegraph" and Google have had a very longstanding
relationship, actually.
And like a lot of publishers, we work with Google
more broadly on lots of different levels, both
using Google products to run the company
and publishing our content onto Google platforms.
But Google Cloud, quite specifically,
performs a couple of key roles.
Firstly, it provides the collaboration tools
that are used throughout the company
to get the day to day job done.
And I think that's been a particularly important, useful,
and powerful part of the engagement
during the turbulence of the last few months.
Google Cloud also provides a lot of our infrastructure
as a service, our cloud infrastructure,
upon which a lot of our digital assets and digital publishing
ecosystem runs.
And also the technology that provides
a lot of our more complex data processing and data analysis.
So there's a few aspects to the Google Cloud engagement there,
but pretty helpful over the last few months.
MADHAV CHINNAPPA: And why Google Cloud, if I may ask?
CHRIS TAYLOR: So very interesting.
Some of it is down to that longstanding relationship
with Google more broadly.
And I think Google Cloud, as it exists now,
has obviously grown together from a number
of different initiatives within Google.
So I suppose we've been involved with Google
Cloud for many, many years as one of the first Google Apps
customers in the UK.
But perhaps more significantly, about 18 months ago,
we decided to move the majority of our cloud infrastructure
from AWS to GCP.
And we did that for a couple of reasons, actually.
Both great sets of products.
Both great companies.
But I think it's funny to think of Google as the fast follower.
And in the cloud infrastructure game,
Google is kind of the fast follower,
with all of the positives that come with that.
That culture of innovation, the willingness to experiment,
the slightly more kind of bleeding edge development
of the product.
All of those things appeal to us.
And I think because of the breadth and the depth
of the relationship we enjoy with the team at Google
in a broader sense, it was a very easy decision
to make to make the move over.
And I think on the data side, some of the Google Cloud
products on the data side really are genuinely ahead
of the rest of market.
So it's the obvious choice, I think, on that space.
MADHAV CHINNAPPA: You mentioned migration there.
I've heard about the Anthos App Migration Project.
Could you tell us a little bit more about it
and how it's gone?
CHRIS TAYLOR: Yeah, certainly.
So I like to think of us as quite a mature user of cloud
technologies.
So that means that I suppose you could even
say we have a bit of a cloud legacy,
where we have some first generation cloud migrations,
particularly virtual machines that were migrated simply
into cloud infrastructure in the kind of first wave.
And equally, we're also keen to experiment and try new tools
when they become available.
And one of the pieces of sort of legacy cloud
infrastructure we had was our old digital archive.
Old first generation VMs moved into the cloud,
not really in a usable state, not really something
that we could exploit within "The Telegraph"
to help drive our subscription strategy.
And therefore, our readers potentially
don't get the experience that we would like them to have.
So we used the Anthos tool to carry out
our first containerization and migration
of those digital archive virtual machines into GCP.
And it worked very well.
The first time, certainly, we had used it,
and it was a very new product.
So of course, there was a little bit of learning and discovering
around the edges on both sides.
But it definitely made what otherwise
would have been a much more long running and complex project
much more straightforward.
And I think will help with further migrations
from, whether it's in our on-premise data center
and other cloud providers into GCP in the future.
So we're definitely using it more.
MADHAV CHINNAPPA: Have to ask the pandemic questions.
How would you say that "The Telegraph" has reacted
to these challenging times, and what role
do you think that technology has played in this,
and how do you think the British population has
been impacted by this?
CHRIS TAYLOR: Well, they have certainly
been challenging times.
I must say I'm very proud of how "The Telegraph" as a whole
has responded.
And I think there's so many aspects to the challenges
that we faced, and indeed, to the role
that I think it was important that we, as a company,
overall played in that, and the role that technology played.
So if I perhaps break it down into a few of those parts.
So firstly, I think we experienced the same challenges
any company would, having to very rapidly go
from largely in-office working to a situation
where everybody was working in a very dispersed way.
We never actually shut our offices completely,
because we have a newsroom to run.
But we went down to something like 5% capacity.
So the vast majority of people working remotely pretty much
overnight.
And that actually went really well.
A few refinements, a little bit of issuing of equipment
to people, a little bit of guidance and advice.
But because we had spent a long time both developing
a culture of trust and the idea of flexible working
being something that we were reasonably comfortable with,
albeit not practiced anything like the scale
as it's had to be in the last few weeks, of course.
And because we had adopted some of those cloud-based
collaboration technologies early on,
as well as some more traditional remote access technologies,
we were quite well set up for that initial transition.
The second challenge for us, which
is much closer to our kind of core strategic purpose
is, we are a major national newspaper.
And in times of major crisis like we have experienced
during the pandemic, there is an important journalistic mission
that the journalists at "The Telegraph"
have to make sure that people are still getting their news.
They are informed.
They're still interrogating and inquiring
around the events of the day, and packaging that up,
whether it's in print or in digital format,
for our readers and subscribers.
Absolutely central to why we are here.
And there was no way in which we could
allow that flow of journalism, newsgathering, and publishing
to be interrupted.
And as you will know from having worked in the media industry
yourself, newsrooms themselves are quite unique places.
They're almost a little bit like complex factories
in terms of the processes that are involved,
the routines, the quality controls, everything.
There's quite a lot that goes into running and operating
a newsroom.
It's much, much more than just an office environment.
So recreating some of the essential elements
of that process, like the daily conferences,
for example, that the editor holds, where
he meets with his senior team.
They discuss the news of the day, what are they getting down
the wires, what appear to be developing stories online,
what do they perhaps have from sources, what position is
"The Telegraph" going to take on the issues of the day
or the issues of moment.
Those are critical set piece events in the day
to the newsgathering and news publishing process.
And they are, by tradition, done in person.
And all of a sudden, we're in a situation where they can't
be done in person anymore.
So recreating that using Google Meet, actually, as the method,
was something that was a top priority focus for us.
And I'm extremely pleased to say that it went very well.
It has now become embedded as the standard way in which this
is done.
And I think probably will stay at least a partially virtual
process going forward, when that was never the case before.
And I think the editorial team responded
amazingly well to the need to make that transition.
And that, I think, is one of the absolutely key things.
And that's a key example of where technology
very specifically addressed a very particular "Telegraph"
challenge and helped us navigate through it without missing
a beat, really.
MADHAV CHINNAPPA: It's fantastic to hear
that the technology from Google Cloud
can enable all the things that you
need to do to do your very important journalistic mission.
Have you been able to quantify the impact of the cloud
technology, either time or cost saved, or number
of people served?
CHRIS TAYLOR: Well, it's really interesting.
Because we've been cloud customers
for quite a long time--
you know, 10 years or, so the cloud journey at "The
Telegraph"-- a lot of those sort of initial cloud adoption-type
measures are long in our history, actually.
So some of those first generation efficiency
gains, collaboration gains.
I mean, they are just sort of normal run of business for us,
and have been for a long time.
So we do adjust our cloud ecosystem periodically
to help try and reduce costs or increase efficiency,
and by degrees, right?
I think we have become reasonably sophisticated
at that.
I mean, the big obvious stats and kind of indicator
is that we've seen a tenfold increase in the use
of Meet during this period.
And that is from a company who was
one of the first adopters of these technologies.
So it's not a new thing for us.
But it's been absolutely central.
We've seen really big similar proportion increases
in the sharing of documents and that kind of thing,
particularly during the first stages of the pandemic when
people were obviously setting up their kind of collaboration
posture as they prepared to work in a dispersed way
for a long period of time.
But I think the biggest kind of metrics of note for us, really,
and it's the same as, I believe, across much of the industry,
is the really, really strong growth
in digital subscriptions.
So it's well understood that during times of real crisis,
people turn to premium, established news brands
that they know and trust both to find out what's going on,
but also to seek the opinion and the kind of comment
and analysis that comes from places like "The Telegraph."
We take that role very seriously.
And the ultimate expression of people's interest and appetite
is the rate at which people are subscribing
to our digital journalism.
And we have seen very, very substantial increases
through this period, as you would expect.
And I think we would hope that not only is that because people
were particularly interested in subscribing to "Telegraph"
journalism during the pandemic.
But it also shows an ever increasing interest
and willingness to pay for news and to subscribe for the longer
term as well.
So I think that's been the area where
we've seen the biggest change.
And the very presentation of that digital subscription
is all powered by technology, much of which
comes from Google.
MADHAV CHINNAPPA: Stepping back a bit.
There's lots of cliches about how the world has changed,
or changing, and all of that.
How would you say this is reflected in "The Telegraph"
on important things like diversity, equity,
and inclusion?
Has the technology helped with that?
What's your general approach around that area?
CHRIS TAYLOR: Yeah.
So again, another really important question.
And I think I'm going to answer it
slightly backwards, actually.
Because I would almost put it as,
how has diversity and inclusion helped us navigate and survive
this period, OK?
Because I think that's the way around, actually.
Because two or three years ago, there was a cultural sea change
here at "The Telegraph" to really recognize and prioritize
the importance of diversity and inclusion.
And it's been something that has been
part of a positive cycle of cultural change and development
here over the last, say, three years or so.
What it's meant, I think, is that we now
have a cultural posture which is much more inclusive, much more
trusting much more flexible, much more open, much
more understanding of the various challenges
that any employee might face.
Whether that's because of their personal circumstances
or whatever it may be.
So when you suddenly find yourself in a situation
where you need to adapt at pace to a genuinely unprecedented
kind of global crisis, having done the work in advance
to establish that kind of culture of inclusion and trust
means that it's just so much easier to take people with you.
And to trust one another, whether it's a manager trusting
their staff who they now can no longer see because they're
not in the office, or whether it's the employee trusting
the manager and the company more broadly that we have their best
interests at heart and we'll do the right thing by them.
I think that the time invested in really developing
that culture in advance has really paid dividends,
and it's one of the key things that made it possible
for us to navigate our way through these challenging
few months.
MADHAV CHINNAPPA: And probably the final question.
But do you think that Google Cloud technologies
has helped shape that culture?
And do you think that the changes
that you've gone through due to the pandemic, how many of them
will live on post-pandemic?
CHRIS TAYLOR: Yeah.
It's very interesting to think the impact
that technology can have on culture.
And I think there are two aspects, really,
where I think that there's been a really direct link.
The first is the ready ability to collaborate, OK?
And I think "The Telegraph" has been
using Google Apps for a long, long time now,
so it's a journey we've been on for many, many years.
So it's a well-established practice.
But that's not to underestimate the positive impact
it has overall on the culture of the company.
The ability to readily collaborate on documents
and work more broadly in a real time setting
is very powerful for kind of cooperation.
It gives everybody a voice.
It removes that kind of historical situation where
somebody is holding the pen and everybody else
kind of is trying to chip in and get their point across.
Everyone can work on things together.
That in itself is very democratizing.
I think it's really interesting as well
to see the different way that people conduct themselves
when they're meeting virtually.
So one of the things that we've said through this period,
and beyond, actually, is that we're
going to hold the majority of our meetings
as virtual meetings.
And that's not just because of pandemic practicalities.
It's because we have observed that when
you hold a meeting virtually, people
are a bit more organized.
It's a little bit more structured.
It's a bit more productive.
But most importantly of all, some of the quieter voices
get their say more readily, and there
is less of this loudest voice dominating the room.
Which I think is great, because it's
meant that really good ideas, great innovation has bubbled
to the surface in a manner where sometimes it
might have struggled to get the necessary airtime.
So that's definitely down to the technology,
and definitely something we'll hang on to going forward.
The other thing which I think has
had a really big cultural impact is the ready availability
of easily digested real time data.
So we have been working with Google BigQuery
for a long time.
But in the last couple of years, we've
really focused on taking the power of BigQuery
and using it to surface real time
dashboards for all employees.
So we have these for the newsroom,
for the senior editors, for the individual journalists,
for our marketing team, for our commercial team,
for our production teams.
And in each case, we've spent careful time
designing things that visually represent what's happening
in the business in real time.
And the ability to do that has made a huge difference,
because it's led to a sense of awareness, visibility,
and it has facilitated immediate real time decision making.
Whereas previously, a lot of those decisions
were dependent on receiving the report from the day before.
That is a really big change.
It's a really big change.
It has turned the conversation into a data-led conversation
in the majority of cases.
Very positive development, I think.
MADHAV CHINNAPPA: I'm so glad you made that data point.
I think it's been one of the learnings from me,
going from a news organization to a technology company,
about the power of data and how much
data is there that publishers have that is untapped.
So it's great to hear that.
Well, I'd just like to say overall, just a huge thank you
to you, Chris.
Thank you so much.
I hope we can meet in person for a pint soon.
CHRIS TAYLOR: I look forward to that also.
It's a pleasure to be asked.
I'm always happy to join a conversation like this,
share ideas and experiences for the greater good of others
as well.
MADHAV CHINNAPPA: Thank you so much.
CHRIS TAYLOR: Thank you.