The Telegraph's digital evolution

What happens when centuries of tradition collide with rapid technological change? In this episode, we sit down with Toby Wright, Group Chief Technology Officer at the Telegraph Media Group, who shares his remarkable 18-year journey steering one of Britain's most venerable news organisations through waves of digital disruption.

Toby's story begins unconventionally—working free night shifts at Intel as a teenager before climbing through the tech ranks. His candid reflections on experiencing heart failure at his desk in 2014 provide a powerful wake-up call about work-life balance in high-pressure technology roles. "Whenever your children know the names of all your staff because they're always ringing you up in the middle of the night—that's a really bad idea," he reflects, offering hard-earned wisdom about sustainable leadership.

Whether you're navigating digital transformation in your own organisation or simply curious about how established institutions adapt to change, Toby's practical wisdom and forthright observations offer valuable perspective on balancing innovation with integrity. Subscribe to hear more conversations with leaders tackling technology's toughest challenges.

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Transcript

Welcome to Toby Wright, Telegraph CTO

Wendy Stonefield 0:04

Welcome to our podcast being a Digital Leader the good, the bad and the ugly of digital transformation. On today's podcast, I'm absolutely delighted to welcome Toby Wright, group Chief Technology Officer at the Telegraph Media Group. Toby, it's fantastic to have you with us today. Toby joins us to share his wealth of experience and his journey in the world of technology and his journey over his illustrious career. So, toby, I'm really looking forward to our chat today. Before we jump in, I thought it'd be great if you could introduce yourself and the role you play at the Telegraph.

Toby Wright 0:44

Thanks, wendy. Thanks for inviting me. Really nice opportunity on this beautiful day being in a dark room. So yeah, my name's Toby. As you said, I'm the Group CTO at the Telegraph. As you'll probably know, it's newspaper website apps, digital publisher Been going since 1856 and continues to go strong, powered, strongly. Subscription business, digital subscription business doing really well, and the team and I look after pretty much anything that the journalists use to create content and curate content, all of the products you can touch and buy, so the apps and stuff like that, and also we do play quite a bit in the print production as well, so all the systems around that.

Wendy Stonefield 1:28

So pretty much the things you'd expect a cto to do at a media company really fantastic and I'm so looking forward to digging into the the amount of change that you've seen over your career um in your sector as well so, um you, you know, before we jump into that, I'm really keen to understand more about how your personal career got started and how you've navigated to where you are today.

Toby Wright 1:53

Okay, so not a classic journey. I wasn't very good at school. I did go to college. I went to college in Swindon lovely swindon town, um and did a sort of computer studies thing because I was really interested in computers. But it was like the days when there's one computer in the school and you had to sort of steal it or fight for it, um, etc. So I got into a course and then it was in swindon and and in Swindon was Intel Corporation and I thought, oh, there was sort of the bellwethers of the sort of initial sort of semiconductor and PC world. So I worked there for six months for free.

Toby Wright 2:34

Basically I used to go in the evening and work night shifts on the mainframe so that the other computer operators because you had people that operated these things back in the day could go to the pub. So I would be sitting there managing this, yeah, computer about the size of this building where sat in on my own age, I don't know, 17 or 18 running all of the anyway. So that was how I got into it and, um, I just carried on, taking opportunities, I went as they presented themselves through and I worked at intel for about 18 years, I think, just taking opportunity as and when it came, but just being really curious and wanting to do things and just saying, well, I'll have a go at that, I'll have a go at that. No idea how to do it, no idea how to do it generally, but learning as I went.

Wendy Stonefield 3:18

It never ceases to amaze me, though, all those stories about you having to be studying in Swindon. They happened to have their lots of luck well you know it's, it's probably, I'm sure, to get that initial break you put yourself out there um as well.

Starting in Tech: From Swindon to Intel

Wendy Stonefield 3:32

So, um, it's really interesting and I suppose when, when we caught up ahead of um coming to record the session today, you, you, um, kind of mentioned like a couple of things that had happened along the way, and one of them had had to do with you. Know, you've obviously been. How long have you been at the Telebot?

Toby Wright 3:50

So it was my 18th year on my birthday last week. So it's my birthday and my start date are coincident.

Wendy Stonefield 3:57

So both of those things, yeah, which is an incredible, incredible journey to have been in that organization and I suppose, seeing the change that the group has navigated over that period, I'm kind of interested. You mentioned sort of along that journey you had a health. I did a health scare, should I call it More?

Toby Wright 4:21

than a scare, more than a scare. Quite an existential event.

Wendy Stonefield 4:25

Yeah.

Toby Wright 4:26

Yeah, so about halfway I don't know 2014, 2015, I had a heart failure, which you know. Obviously, people don't say that things are about stress, but all the signs were there, because I happened at my desk at six o'clock in the morning and I was out of action for about seven months after that. So, whilst that gave me some perspective, I don't recommend it to give perspective.

Toby Wright 4:50

No, definitely not. And I did go back, I mean, even though it probably took longer to go back than you'd normally do. I mean I had open up valve replacement and repair and stuff like that. So it was a big, big operation. But seven months out was probably because it was more, it was more psychological that you know that that that was the place where this thing had happened.

Toby Wright 5:13

I didn't want to go back to that place and um, but you know I got through it because I really like doing what I do for a living.

Wendy Stonefield 5:20

So I think it's an interesting thing and it's not something we've really focused on is the nature of being involved in the kind of work that we do, like a big transformation or big programs of work. You, I think, working in news, there's a natural. You've got to get their deadlines and you've got to get everything out.

Wendy Stonefield 5:42

And there is pressure, got to get everything out and there is pressure. How do you you know it's not something we've really talked about, but I think it is really important is, how do you navigate that as as a leader, in terms of managing your well-being, your time in the context of that being in a stressful environment and role?

Toby Wright 5:58

well, I sort of, in hindsight, didn't do a particularly good job of it up until then. Yeah, um, and I was just I was just thinking about this the other day when, when we talked earlier was you know, I thought, yeah, whenever you had young children or when they were younger, whenever your children know the names of all of your staff, because they're always ringing you up in the middle of the night. That's a really bad idea, that's a really bad thing. That should have been a, that should have been a signal. Um, so, yeah, my, the, my sort of work-life balance the world.

Wendy Stonefield 6:25

Yeah, it wasn't very good, it wasn't very good.

Toby Wright 6:27

It wasn't very good, um so, um, I mean it still could be better. But you know I'm getting there, I'm getting there. So but I think, I think just trying to get perspective. But but if you're, if you read, but it it wasn't that. You know it's because I probably overthink stuff and over, over committed to things. You don't have to do that, you know you. It's because I probably overthink stuff and over committed to things. You don't have to do that. You literally don't have to do that. You know you can have a perfectly satisfactory career without doing things like that. I mean, that was just me.

Wendy Stonefield 6:54

Yeah, so those were things that you really consciously post that life event. I was conscious of it when it was happening, but I sort of chose that.

Health Scare and Work-Life Balance

Toby Wright 7:03

Well, this is, I'd enjoy this and I you know it's a bit of an adrenaline thing, you know throughout when you're looking after sort of big you know big internet scale systems and things. It's quite and there's a lot riding on it yeah there's a lot riding on it, so it's quite a bit. It's quite, and it was the same when I worked for reuters before. It was a similar type of thing, similar kind of deal well, they're not nine to five organizations, are they?

Toby Wright 7:24

no, yeah, I've never worked in a nine to five job yeah, um, you know, you went into computer science.

Wendy Stonefield 7:31

You were you were talking about at college you then went on to work in the sector. How, how have you, how do you keep yourself abreast of um changes in the tech space?

Toby Wright 7:44

I just a lot, but also and it's part of my, I guess part of my management style I am fascinated with what my teams do, to the point of probably annoying them on a daily basis. I'm fascinated in the detail. And why are you doing that? Why are you doing that? Can you tell me about that? So I do a lot of reverse mentoring and reverse coaching with people because I'm fascinated by and it's a vicarious thing I want, I want to be doing it, I want to be writing code, I want to be doing these things. I don't want to be doing what I do.

Wendy Stonefield 8:12

So so I learn a lot from just sitting listening to people, helping them solve problems and I suppose over your, over your, your career, you've been involved in some really interesting and challenging initiatives, programs and projects. Can you tell us about any that in particular stand out for you over that time?

Toby Wright 8:36

So I think a big one was. Towards the end of my time at Intel Corporation I switched out. I was quite keen to move because I've been there for so long. I didn't want to be there for too long and we it was 88, 98, just the internet was starting to rev up and we decided to get into the online data center business because at that point intel um yeah, the internet ran on some microsystems and and for and Unix and stuff like that, and obviously Intel needed to sell Intel architecture to run the internet on and there wasn't really a use case. So we built, you know, we spent multi billions dollars building data centers to then put Intel computers in to run people's websites, and I think, one of the big ones. If you remember, it's a long time ago, but we had a hard day, a 4th of July 2001 or 2000.

Toby Wright 9:31

And it was when Big Brother the first Big Brother was going to air and that was a live you know, live streaming from the house and we ran the broadcast operations center out of our data center because it was all IP broadcasting. No one had done any of that at that much scale. So we started building this data center from the slab up a year before and we had it had to be open by the fourth of july. That had to be, and, and we did it and it was just a phenomenal achievement that I've ever been part of. And you just building a building with 75,000 square foot full of computers, with data centre, and actually being ready for this event.

Wendy Stonefield 10:12

Very high profile, yeah, it was big news.

Toby Wright 10:15

It was back then yeah, and it was like, and it was, I just thought we're never going to do this. Most people take four years to do this sort of thing and we did it in a year and it worked and that was phenomenal. And we built a team from nothing to about 500 people, and then we had to hire the team and hire the operations staff and that was a massive. I felt really sort of, yeah, I mean, in the end it all went sideways.

Wendy Stonefield 10:49

But when the internet initially went mad when the dot-com bubble.

Toby Wright 10:50

None of our customers could pay their bills and they had to shut it all down but for that moment when it had to be up and working, cool yeah, and ticketing systems and you know an early iteration of google and places like in our data center, it's really good fun and what I mean.

Wendy Stonefield 11:00

Essentially, you talk about the team and and the, the, the lack of belief initially that it could actually be done. What would you sum up? The approach to building that team and the culture you developed around that team?

Toby Wright 11:14

Well, at that point, intel had a pretty strong culture. It was sort of the preeminent company of the industrial age back then, you know, most successful company in the history of companies back in the late 90s. Um, so it was a pretty, it was a pretty good, but we did have to build a team from scratch for that business. So, yeah, um, so it was very, very, very significant interviewing process and things like that, but also really making sure that we got right in the detail with this, with the staff and, you know, showing them how we need to do things. We did all these things, all technology transfers. We got people over from the US and from Ireland and said, right, whole impact teams that said this is how we do things, how we build the chip factories, this is how we're going to build the data centre and stuff like that.

Wendy Stonefield 11:59

So real immersion, real immersion, the mission, real immersion absolute immersion, absolute immersion.

Toby Wright 12:05

And then it helped. We were all in the same place, we were all in the same building. It was all new. Everybody did you know. You went to work in PPE and sort of you know gloves and helmet and glasses every day. And you all, everyone, had the same goal Fourth of July, open. And when the guy that I worked with, who did it, said how did you do it? When he was asked years later, he said all I did was set a date and didn't let us move. That's what he said.

Wendy Stonefield 12:29

That's what he did and you know, especially having this conversation post-covid era, where I think a lot of companies still struggle to bring people, I mean where people aren't in five days a week and I know the telegraph media group is probably because the the work you do is also quite different in that regard, but there is something to be said. I think around, when a team is really aligned around a mission is is the time together, yeah, and what happens?

Toby Wright 12:57

by osmosis, almost between, those teams when they physically are co-located and that's why, you know, during, during, during the pandemic, we went, we, most of us went in, all the journalists went in and you know we felt it important that we went in to support them and so you know it was, it was, you know, interesting going in, but you know, when we were as long as we were legally allowed in, we went in I would imagine that would have been a a very different experience going into London during that time. It was quite weird.

Wendy Stonefield 13:28

Well, I suppose you, key workers, in that you were getting the news out at a very pivotal time.

Toby Wright 13:35

Well, I used to walk in every day and it was quite weird.

Wendy Stonefield 13:42

Yeah, I would imagine so and obviously, like in the latter years and I speak about the work that we've done together with you, um in in your role, um, I mean, are there any sort of key highlights from that that you'd pull out in terms of how you've approached it and what?

Intel's Data Center Challenge

Toby Wright 14:02

you, yeah, I mean think, if I think about sort of things at the telegraph, that sort of stand out for me. Um, and I was hired in 2010 to sort of kick off the transformation and we, you know, there wasn't much. It was 2008, sorry, 2008, there wasn't much. There wasn't much leeway. You know, there was a. We had a team of under 150 people in the technology team, but no one with no, no software engineers, no developers, it was all it. And the challenge was well, we need to build digital products. Well, these people weren't the right people to build digital products, so we had to the same amount of headcount, we had to sort of shift it sideways or shift it left to make you know to. And then the way, the way we did that was very, very early cloud adoption.

Toby Wright 14:43

Um, yeah, some of it didn't work. I mean, you could imagine a very traditional to the outside world. It's not, it's actually not, but a very traditional um, internal it operation. We said, right, we're going to use google, google mail, all of those things, when back in 2008 it wasn't the dumb thing, wasn't particularly enterprise ready, so that was quite interesting, but it unlocked more and more people that didn't have to be running around rebooting servers and patching cables and worrying about that and eventually, over time, we could build up an engineering team in the same headcount base because we basically got all of the stuff that we didn't need to run around, all the undifferentiated equipment and services, amazon, early iterations of Amazon and Salesforce and all of those kind of things, and that was a real. So it allowed you to morph the team.

Toby Wright 15:36

Yeah, yeah, and that was a real. That was timing. You couldn't have probably done that two years before and you know it was have probably done that two years before and you know it was. It was timing, that one, and and timing and being curious about what. Let's try this. This looks unproven and but this looks like one way of doing it. Um, that paid off because pretty much, and then it helped. It helped with the transformation because it also um, it also established us and the telegraph is as technologically sort of leaning leaning into this stuff which people didn't expect. They didn't expect, you know, they thought we'd be the last bastion of that kind of you know.

Toby Wright 16:17

So yeah, traditional, yeah, service in the basement, yeah, but yeah, and having control over everything. But we'd already outsourced our print presses before then.

Wendy Stonefield 16:32

So there was a, it had been ignited. The change, yeah, yeah, no. It's really interesting because I suppose when you think about the core business you're in of delivering the news, has been through such fundamental change, the work that you've done to effectively take that and then deliver it to an end consumer in a very different way and I know I still love holding a paper as well.

Wendy Stonefield 16:57

I know I'm relatively rare in that I'm becoming rarer, but I still enjoy that. But I do equally enjoy being able to access my digital version of the product.

Toby Wright 17:07

It's still a very important part of the of the offer the paper. Really, you know it's very important and it's a key part of the brand and it's a it's a key thing and it's a big differentiator and because you know you'd see not many people start newspapers yeah, and they probably wouldn't, but once you've got one, it's a really good thing.

Toby Wright 17:24

It's a fantastic asset and a fantastic, you know, part of the whole telegraph story but then I suppose what you've built around the core product that you produce in terms of experience of of the telegraph, brand is very significant yeah and we do try and carry that through into the digital sort of expression of that, um, being very, very careful with how we do try and carry that through into the digital sort of expression of that being very, very careful with how we do advertising and commercial To make sure it's all about the reader. We're not trying to sort of compromise the reader with commercial offers and advertising. It's all about what they're reading and hopefully they'll get some commercial opportunity that they're interested in. But it doesn't get in the way. It's not just adverts coming in from the side and hitting them in five in-stream videos running or something. So it's subtle and in keeping with the essence of the brand.

Toby Wright 18:16

Yeah, exactly that.

Wendy Stonefield 18:18

And I do think it is interesting, because people obviously bring their experiences as consumers of public services, um, and what they're consuming from other brands and companies in the space, to you as a, as an organization, um, and I I suppose that's also going to change significantly as your, your future, um subscribers and and readers come through.

Wendy Stonefield 18:44

Yeah um I suppose I'm keen to understand more about how you work with the different parts of your organization to ensure that from a technology perspective, you're able to stand up to those future ideas and thinking about where the organization is going strategically in servicing your audience and I look at it, I look at my role.

Toby Wright 19:11

Is it predominantly? It's all got to work. It's all got to work really well. So without that part of the puzzle, all bets are off. So you know, the team, the teams, spend a lot amount of their time and effort making sure we've got robust, resilient offer so that people can experiment on top of that, can make new things. They may not work, but that bit, only a small bit, will work. So there's a sort of a damage limitation. We can try something, but the whole thing doesn't sort of fold up. So without that you don't really have a strategy. So we've got a different sort of layers of pardon me, different layers of strategy for different sort of tiers of service. But the job of writing and curating content and publishing it is sacrosanct. Yeah, that really is.

Wendy Stonefield 20:02

And that's your permission, like having that nailed and delivering is your permission to almost elevate from that.

Toby Wright 20:07

And that's the permission for others to try new things, but without those other things that are paying for that to happen, it's very difficult. So you know I like difficult. Yeah, um, so you know, I like to think that. You know, I think in the history of the, in interest of the time, there's only been one or two times when we haven't got a paper out every day, and so in the 18 years I've been there, we've pretty much always had the website, the website's been up. So you know, and that's that's that's really important to us, really important to us. I'm sure a lot of people won't notice, but it's really important to us that it always works and it's always fast and it's always safe, it's always secure and it's also protecting your privacy when you use it. Really important to us.

Wendy Stonefield 20:46

Well, I would imagine that speaks to the values of the brand itself.

Toby Wright 20:50

Yeah, exactly, yeah, exactly. You know the trust in the brand really.

Wendy Stonefield 20:53

Yeah, that's great. Thank you for sharing that, and I think, if we move more to the conversation around transformation digital transformation, a term that's been around for banded about for a long, long time, I think will we ever be, will forever be, in a state of transformation. I'm interested in terms of how you define it, what it's meant to you in terms of your, your career, and and how your approach has evolved over the years to it so first, I think it's interesting, you said, you at that point, of a continuum it's it's never really been a thing, certainly in the last 20 years.

Toby Wright 21:31

It's like well, of course you transform, you transform every day. You don't do something, stop and then do it again in six months time. It's a continuous thing. It's a continuous effort to do something better today than we did yesterday, to do it faster, cheaper, safer, better for the consumer, better for the product, better for our internal audience, better for the journalist. So and that that that's a continuum. That that was something that is interesting.

Toby Wright 21:58

It was always in the sort of dna of the telegraph, because, even because you know, print always had to be even back, you know it always had to be an automated business, because to distribute mass media, even in the 1800s, you had to have technology that didn't exist to make it work. You know, sort of being able to print two copies at a time instead of one, or eight copies instead of four, or 16 instead of eight. All of those technologies had to be invented for an out to allow mass media to work. So so so it's in the dna of the media, the news media anyway, that they're very actually technology tech, not not technically being technology companies, but very technologically, technologically advanced or or open to those things, because you just have to there had to be, you had to you had to and, yeah, you've seen in the history of it.

Toby Wright 22:47

You know from the internet, from social media and now from you know ai, all these things that come at us, that are existential events. But we've been through the first couple and the current one with the zero-click search. When you think about a lot of the top of funnel for news media companies is Google search or platform search, and when an AI overview answers the question, you don't get the click back. So then you have to look at different ways of dealing with this. Look after the subscription, look after your subscribers, look after the people that you've got, because the acquisition channels are getting smaller and smaller and being controlled by less and less people, which is fairly troubling but it's almost through your description.

Wendy Stonefield 23:45

It is going back to the basics of looking after those people who you've already acquired how do you maximise lifetime value and what your retention strategy is around those subscribers and making sure yeah, making sure people to spend time with our products, that's a key thing.

Toby Wright 24:04

You know, it's like how, making sure they want to spend time looking at our content and our articles and our products rather than, yeah, netflix or being asleep or something you know.

Wendy Stonefield 24:18

Yeah, because I I suppose you know I was having a conversation with my 21 year old around um, you know what, what media he and his friends consume, etc. But also the concept of you know you. You've got a certain amount of time that is almost like your free time, where you choose to put. That is really. Those are important decisions aren't they Exactly?

Toby Wright 24:43

they really are. It's what we're competing for. That's what we're all competing for.

Wendy Stonefield 24:46

Yeah, and I'm particularly in the world in which we live and where young people in particular, their go-to sources, the influence of social media platforms. You know, I think you work in a sector that has also huge responsibility and onus on it to help to educate and actually bring fact-checked content out into society. What are your and I know this is a really tough question, toby and you know, what are your, your views in terms of how do we safeguard that? Because I, you know the thing. I even look at my son and I think you know you and I do tell him this you know you've got to be really careful because you know, a huge amount of stuff that you will see and read and listen to online is not fact checked, it's not validated. What is your perspective on all of that?

Toby Wright 25:45

Well, obviously my personal it's not. It may or may not be the company view, but my personal perspective is that there are technical technological advances that can help. There are things like the content authenticity initiative where you can, can stamp, you know from you call it glass to glass, from the camera to the screen, to make sure that that was actually real content hasn't been fiddled with in the way and it can prove that someone said something or it can prove, yeah, it was that person said it. I mean, it still doesn't mean what they said was true, but at least that person said it. So there's lots of there and lots more technologies. I think sort of have been tried.

Toby Wright 26:22

So even things like you know, sort of you know before everybody was um fell in love with generative ai when you know blockchain was the last big thing. But things like blockchain. Can it can help there? Yeah, immutable records of what people did and what content where content went because it can all be tracked.

Toby Wright 26:33

It can help there, yeah, immutable records of what people did and what content, where content went, because it can all be tracked. It can all be tracked and all retraced, I mean. But it just it does take a sort of collective because, you know, if I, if I sort of tell you that this, this says that I said that, and you don't care to display that, it doesn't really help. So everybody has to do it, or no?

Wendy Stonefield 26:55

one has to do it.

Toby Wright 26:56

Everyone has to sort of be involved. So there are, there are technical technology, sort of ways that can help. It's just do people want to use them and do people want to do people care enough about it as well? Because you know, I think if you think you of it's entertainment and the risks are lower with entertainment in general, we're all used to watching things on entertainment. It's clearly not true. So you know it's like the lines are blurred, yeah, yeah, so I mean again, I think. But I think it's really important, certainly in the UK, to have the freedom for outfits like ours to do what we do and we're trusted to do it by and by by the general public.

Wendy Stonefield 27:44

Yeah, really interesting and good to hear your perspectives on it. So we know we're in a world where everything is constantly evolving. So I suppose your take on transformation is we'll always be in this state. Um, otherwise, well, you, you are or you don't, you'll cease to exist ultimately, um, and you know, I suppose for you over your career, I'm interested in kind of how do you stay motivated? What, what gets you out of bed in the morning?

Telegraph's Digital Transformation Journey

Toby Wright 28:14

so I what gets me out of bed in the morning? So I what gets me out of bed in the morning? Well, I don't have a dog. I just like the fact that I can come in and I can make a difference. So if you think about my current role, anything between eight to nine million paid views a day on our a day that's a lot of people looking at things and I want them to get a good experience. I want it to work and I've got a lot of pride in myself and the company and the team about how we go about doing those things. So just the technical challenge of doing it. So for me it's mostly the technical challenge of doing it day and die out consistently. That does keep me. Actors get me up in the morning because he's never boring. I've never been bored in the 18 years of in that which is amazing yeah, I mean there's always something going.

Toby Wright 29:07

I mean I might been terrified, I might have been I was gonna say there probably many things.

Wendy Stonefield 29:10

I keep you awake at night, let's get you out.

Toby Wright 29:13

I don't have to get up in the morning because I've been up all night sometimes in the old day not so much now but there's, and there's always a big. There's always something too big to plan for or something happening. It's, it's, it is fascinating and you're in the front row of.

Wendy Stonefield 29:27

Sometimes it feels like you're in the front row of history being made because yeah, I would imagine, because big when you say big things to plan for elections, for example.

Toby Wright 29:36

Yeah, big events, big state events, things like that. There's always something going on and I do like the idea that we are helping my colleagues in editorial do their job, but very visually, because I think you've seen our office and the newsroom is, yeah, we can all see into the newsroom and you're very, very close to the action. You're not sort of some sort of abstract.

Wendy Stonefield 30:05

Yeah, there's a physical proximity.

Toby Wright 30:07

Yeah, your internal customers and external customers aren't some kind of abstract concept. They're actual people that also know where you sit.

Wendy Stonefield 30:16

They'll come find you. Yeah, something to definitely sharpen the mind, um and and as you know, we're touching on the good, the bad and the ugly of digital transformation, um. Is there a moment that stand out for you as being um? You talked about your your earlier intel um piece of work um, but is there another kind of key moment of success?

Toby Wright 30:40

um for you, yeah, a big one recently, I guess, and it was obviously it was a. It was a sad moment with it, with the queen passing, but we'd been planning for that as an industry for years. I remember someone telling me that when I joined in 2008, and it was always the use case for whenever we did technology investments or technology builds Will this work when the queen dies? And it was always that kind of planning for those things and turns out what was going on in the year previous, we were just getting to a, we were doing a. You know we do strategic platform upgrades as as a, as a very deliberate thing, and we'd just been um, just about to do um, an eight.

Toby Wright 31:27

We'd finished an 18 month rollout of a new, our new website, our new publishing system, and we'd been running it because the only way to know if it was going to work was to build it and try and make it work. So the team managed to build a system where we would run the old, the current one and the new one side by side with the same amount of traffic. So three, four, five, twelve million pages a day with, you know, millions of unique users, the same amount of journeys. We ran in parallel, which was a massively complicated technical undertaking, but we had to do it because we needed to see the two together and we were running that when the event happened, and so that was one of the biggest traffic events we'd ever experienced. And so we did that and it worked, and then we tied up, we finished the program and then in jan 27th the next year and then people think, what would you know?

Toby Wright 32:19

The coronation is coming up, but clearly we're not gonna. We're not gonna run the coronation on this new platform. We can, we just can we delay it for until we got the coronation said no, we absolutely can't, because I absolutely know it's gonna work. So how do you know? Well, it worked for this one, it worked for this one, it worked for that one, and it did, and that was. I was super proud about that because it would have been so easy just to kick that project down the road for a year, kick it down the road for a year and then do it later.

Toby Wright 32:44

It's a no. I know it's going to work, so we should do it and it was fine. It kind of takes me back.

Wendy Stonefield 32:52

Set the deadline and actually sometimes a team needs that deadline to stand up to.

Toby Wright 32:59

I mean, a lot of people, certainly in our line of work, think deadlines. It's all agile, you don't have deadlines. You absolutely do have a deadline, even if you don't have a deadline. Someone's got a deadline, the CEO's got a deadline, the bank's got a deadline.

Wendy Stonefield 33:11

I was going to say.

Toby Wright 33:11

There's normally a budget, the investors have got a deadline, somebody in the chain has got a deadline, the investors have got a deadline, somebody in the chain has got a deadline and you need to. Sometimes you have to bring that deadline in so people understand that and you know it's, it's not, it's it's. I find it's a very useful, not a forcing factor, because that sounds like aggressive, but it's a very useful tool and it's a way of getting everyone aligned and it does, and a bit of risk and a bit of reward.

Toby Wright 33:35

I mean I think it and in all of the really big programs we've done. So those are two examples that's worked really well yeah, no, it's really interesting.

Wendy Stonefield 33:43

I don't I, I, I do, I. I agree with you no, I don't disagree.

Toby Wright 33:48

I absolutely agree with you. Do not disagree with me.

Wendy Stonefield 33:50

Yes, absolutely um, and as well as the successes. Obviously, what we do is often really challenging and difficult and does entail risk and in order to innovate, at times, more risk. Are there any kind of standout moments where you've had to backtrack, change pivot, re-engineer, refocus?

Toby Wright 34:11

Often, often and that's part of it, I think that's part of the skill is looking at things and thinking, yeah, we that that was right for the time. But I'm a keen proponent of you know, when the facts change, you change your mind. You know, don't just behold, yeah, don't just plow on. Nothing's too big to fail. Um, so we did it. We did it, and a while ago, with an iteration of our mobile app. Now, the mobile app, which and digit of help just done in a recent iteration is a very, very key product for us, very key product. Um, it's a sort of hero product and I can't remember quite a while ago, but it was very much, the view was we're never going to build native apps because it's just too complicated. And it was too complicated, we didn't know how to do it. Really, we had at one point a big team trying to build a native iOS app and we couldn't do it. And we tried to do an Android app. We couldn't do it. But everybody wanted a native app because they wanted that app experience and we spent a lot of time trying to sort of set the, set that out of that. No, we're gonna do, we're gonna do hybrid, we're gonna use web code for this, because we've got a big web team over here and no big turn and it and it got that, it got and doing that got the app to where we needed to be. We had a very, very significant monthly active user target and that methodology.

Toby Wright 35:37

When we said, no, we're not going to do native, we're going to do web code. And there were tons of compromises, didn't? That meant the product couldn't do some of the things, like things like dark mode, for instance, or certain things. And then we got through that one. And then then we had to say you know what web code isn't the way to go anymore and we had to completely re-engineer it. But you know, instead of plowing on and just trying to make it work, we just started again. And, yeah, that was difficult, it was difficult to do. It, put you know, meant sort of putting the cones up months and months and months, but then and then to deliver something that looked pretty much the same as the thing that we started with, but it's now much more operationally, yeah, yeah, and flex it gives you exactly so many many examples of of going down one route, very, very, very, very um precisely, and then saying that that worked in 2018.

Toby Wright 36:34

It's not going to work in 2019. So, and having the sort of backing of the teams and the stakeholders to say, well, yeah, actually last time you said this you were right, so perhaps you'll tolerate.

Wendy Stonefield 36:47

You know what you're doing. So, yeah well, I think it's an interesting we not I, but we. I think it's really interesting because, when you talk about it, what absolutely came into my mind is, um, the foundations that you have laid in order to have the confidence and the trust of those key stakeholders in your organization is surely absolutely critical when you, when you are making those pivots, it is about that and I mean, obviously I look at it from a perspective of being a sort of a serial employee.

Toby Wright 37:16

You know, often, you know, these days people don't hang around for more than two or three years, so it's harder to do. It just happens to be. I've found somewhere that I can hang around long enough and be tolerated long enough. But I had worked I mean my first half of my career at the telegraph.

Toby Wright 37:30

I worked for nine different people and trying to keep things alive, trying to keep multi-year programs and strategies going for someone that's been in there for one year and then then trying to get the next person coming to to get on board.

Wendy Stonefield 37:42

But it's really difficult, but you sort of have to do it I think difficult and and probably you know, I think, somebody in the role that you play, it's quite challenging, um, to get the level, the narrative right around what you're doing, because some people struggle to go into, they don't really have the time, or the space to go into the detail, to really understand it in any level of depth, but for you to be able to give enough of that narrative that they can see where you're going and why you're going there yeah and yeah, because sometimes it's easy not to do that most of, because sometimes it's easier not to do that.

Toby Wright 38:16

Most of the time it's easier not to do that. Oftentimes it's easier to just kick the can down the road a bit.

Wendy Stonefield 38:24

I mean it's interesting you say that because if you look at and I haven't looked at the latest stats of the average tenure of a CIO, but I think your longevity in role has probably led to you making some fantastic not that other CIOs don't always do this- because, there's CTO, but there's there's a. You know you, you have carried the decisions that you've made.

Toby Wright 38:50

Well, there's and there's tenure. You're right and you know what. That's part of my part of my thought process the decision I make today. I'm probably given how I operate. I'm probably going to be here when that gets done and it breaks in a year or two years time. So I'm probably gonna have to do it properly and I do think about that and that's. That's just part of my part of my thing.

Wendy Stonefield 39:12

I mean, it is like yeah, but it drives a different yeah, it does drive a very different decision making.

Toby Wright 39:18

Yeah, it does, I would imagine, even if it's not a conscious yeah, yeah, at a subconscious level, as you, as you've said it, I've just thought it's actually subconscious.

Wendy Stonefield 39:26

But yeah, um, and when it comes to team dynamics, and I know you've spoken um very fondly about the time that you spend with your team and how much you through reverse mentoring et cetera, what you get out of that as well. When it comes to team dynamics and leadership, what matters most to you as a leader?

Royal Events and Technical Challenges

Toby Wright 39:47

So what matters is that people. It sounds trite, I guess, but I want them to enjoy what they're doing, because I enjoy what I'm doing and I don't expect people to come in and be miserable for eight or nine or ten hours a day. If they're going to give it, then I want them to enjoy what they're doing. So I'm keen that they enjoy it. I'm keen they have different opportunities. We rotate people around. We actively progress people. We don't wait for them to ask us for promotion. We say, well, progress people. You know we don't wait for them to ask us for promotion. We say what you, you're doing really well, we're going to promote you and we're going to move you to this because we think you're going to be good at this. Yeah, that may or may not always be welcome, but you know it works. It on the, on the, on the whole it works. And I just like people progress. I like seeing people progress and when we got some fantastic people that came in from you know, being junior journalists, into our help desk and then into, you know, incident management and then into engineering, and then, you know, and an amazingly well-rounded people because they've come through different groups, they haven't just come out of you

Toby Wright 40:45

know uni doing comp, sci or something. They just you know, they've done other things and they're just keen. So I guess the thing I really want is I want people to be curious, try, think, try new things, make mistakes, you know. Failing it's an awful cliche, I guess, but failing is learning, you know, and it's like and and you want people to do that, but I really do, I. I I absolutely do want people to enjoy what they're doing, because I don't like being in a room with a load of miserable people. So you know.

Wendy Stonefield 41:14

No, it's really interesting. No one does I agree with you. I think there are times, though, I'm interested in how you, as a leader, keep people. There are times, though, where you're pushing through some of the hard stuff.

Toby Wright 41:28

But you get your point about, you know, getting the credit for that through other things. You sort of get the credit for that through other things. You sort of get the credit for that. As long as you don't, as long as that's not your default position because we've all worked for people whose default position is that and as long as there's some light and shade, I think you get the permission to sometimes. No, this is non-negotiable, we're doing this, but sometimes it's okay. You, you do it that way. That's fine.

Wendy Stonefield 41:50

You, you, you know you've earned that. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Toby Wright 41:54

So it's give and take, I guess.

Wendy Stonefield 41:56

No, really interesting, and I think we've done well because we've spoken for some time. We may have had one mention of AI or Gen AI, but I think we've done quite well, toby.

Toby Wright 42:06

To not mention it.

Wendy Stonefield 42:07

Yeah, I think we'd be remiss, though I'd probably get some grief if I didn't really ask you for your perspective on the role of AI, the impact that it will have in your sector. What is your perspective?

Toby Wright 42:25

Well, I guess A nobody knows that's a good start for 10.

Toby Wright 42:29

That will temper what I say. We've been using, as I call it, or we call it, old fashioned AI for a long time. I mean for seven, eight years. We've been using machine learning and AI to do things like propensity scoring, for our paywall, to see who's gonna subscribe, who's not gonna subscribe, for categorizing audiences, for lots and lots of different things, for doing analytics. So we've been using it for a long time and I think the generative AI, sort of you know post, sort of 23, 24, uh, 20, 23, 24 has obviously now come after the creative industries more than any other technology has done, and I think you know it's come after. It's come after white collar and creative industries, which you know we've all been you know, happy about.

Toby Wright 43:17

Over the years in the industrial revolution. No one there the sort of the elite classes in didn't really care about that because it wasn't coming after them.

Toby Wright 43:24

But now it's coming after everybody and everything very quickly. So I guess that's not just my industry, it's everybody's industry because it now has it. These technologies have the ability to do pretty much anything that you can think of and perhaps can't think of, but I think, practically for us, we've got a very strong stance, which most of our peers have. We won't use generative AI to create content, because where does that differentiate us from somebody like a big technology platform who can do that? Because they have all the data, have all our data, they have all our content. They have all our data. They have all our content. You know they've, you know they free road ridden on our content and train their large language models for years. So, so so we use it currently for much more for the pre-production, for reduction, for, for helping and amplifying the work in the in, in the, in the curation, in creating product process.

Toby Wright 44:24

So lots of you know things that we, but for doing things that we wouldn't ordinarily do. Not replacing things we already do better, but doing things we just didn't have the time to do before. So I know, making sure that every single article has got the right tagging or accessibility tags or SEO tags all of the things that we all know have to do but they just take people and time to do. Sometimes they don't get done. So, doing a lot of the things that it can get given to a machine to do, um, but also suggesting oh look, we've written, you've just written an article about this. Well, we wrote five articles about this in the last 10 years that you may not have realized or remembered or even been here to know about. So we helping to go and surface relevant content internally that we'd written years ago to inform you know, storytelling to help you know, dig facts out.

Toby Wright 45:19

It's incredibly powerful for you know, if you think about one of the things we were very famous for um the mp's expenses that took tens and tens of journalists months and months in a darkened room disconnected from the internet to do, to go through all of that data. Nowadays you can just pile all those pds into something like notebook lm or something and it will just find it and it will find all the connections and all the links and you could do that in perhaps a week. It took 40 man months to do or 40 man weeks to do before.

Wendy Stonefield 45:50

So it's a really intelligent, targeted application of it to help ensure that you're actually. You know it's freeing up time that otherwise would have been spent doing things that weren't as high value. But we're also doing some things, time that otherwise would have been spent doing things that weren't as high value, but we also we're also doing some things.

Toby Wright 46:05

So our, our ukraine. The podcast is a very popular product, but to to we're using generative ai to re-voice that in russian and ukrainian, so it's got a wide audience so people that want to hear about what's going on that perhaps don't speak english but can access your content exactly and that's been really popular.

Toby Wright 46:23

So we, so we, the team, have done some amazing work with you know, taking that, taking the, the audio, and revoicing it with the same accent, the same presenter's voice, but in a different language, and that's. That's opened up a massive new audience. So using that, but it's not changing the, it's not changing the core of what?

Wendy Stonefield 46:43

yeah, it's not changes the content.

Toby Wright 46:45

Um it's, it's just helping it some sort of adjacency, so we'll probably see lots of things like that as well in the past.

Wendy Stonefield 46:53

I mean it's really interesting and I suppose you've been really clear then as a, as an organization, there is a sanctity around the content production. That is very much your core as a business.

Toby Wright 47:06

We've got a room full of humans doing a very human job and we're very keen that that continues.

Wendy Stonefield 47:13

Yeah, really interesting. Thank you for sharing your thinking on that, toby. So we've spoken about changes in the sector ever-evolving landscape, how you're currently using AI and Gen AI. At the receiving end of all of this, you've got a lot of change in terms of how young people and we touched on it briefly are consuming news. How does this influence strategic decisions within the organization?

Toby Wright 47:49

so organizations like ours I can't say we are doing it or anyone else's thing, but need to start to think about who the audience actually is. Is the audience going, in the future, going to be human beings, or is it the audience going to be someone else's large language model, which then is going to present the content to people?

AI Strategy in Media

Toby Wright 48:07

because that's going to be very interesting and difficult, like really difficult, because if you pay, lots of people pay subscriptions for various things like Medium or Substack or all of those if you're a keen consumer of news media, if you can pay £20 for one Uber subscription, that will give you everything you want from someone like one of the big companies, why would you buy all the other ones? I mean, that's my very personal opinion, not anyone's official't no one, I don't. That's not, not anyone's official view on this. I suspect that's what I feel. That's what I feel seeing seeing the young people I know, consuming, consuming news, because they don't. They don't buy clearly don't buy papers, don't subscribe to specific titles. You know, either get it all consolidated through um channels, you know, like google discover, or, yeah, through tiktok or instagram or probably lots of new ones I don't know about, and more and more, yeah, things like um open ai, asking open ai, or chat gbd about stuff and just okay, yeah, like what's going on today in xyz and okay Z and okay, I'm up to date now.

Toby Wright 49:25

Very convenient, very easy, very cheap, very scary, toby, yeah, very scary, very scary in many ways.

Wendy Stonefield 49:35

So I think, as you say, we'll have to wait and see how that plays out, and I know you probably can't divulge any details for obvious reasons, but would you say that publications do and are focused on strategically understanding their consumers of the future?

Toby Wright 49:56

Have to be. Have to be, I mean because otherwise you haven't got a future right. I mean people get old and stop doing things at a certain age. You need to go further and further and further down. I mean, when I started at Telegraph, I think the average age was 59, readership, and as we went through it it went, went. You know, the median age perhaps went further and further down towards the 30s and the 20s. But we just had to work on that, we had to work on that, but it helped.

Toby Wright 50:29

But it was helped by those media channels being invented, like when snapchat was invented. That was a great one for us, because suddenly we got got on that one and lots of young people thought, oh, this is cool, because we were the only news band in there for a while. So so the technology does help.

Wendy Stonefield 50:45

It's not like it's a bad thing it can actually really open up a conduit to your. It's not a bad thing to new, new audiences, mostly a good thing, and I'm sitting here.

Toby Wright 50:54

As a technologist, you know it's, it's a good thing, it's it's generally good, just needs to.

Wendy Stonefield 50:59

People need to just keep an eye on it yeah, absolutely um, and you know personalization in the context of what, what you do and your content um. I'm really interested. Can you share any insights into the personalization strategies that that you've implemented um and how they align with the broader sort of efforts of of of telegraph media?

Toby Wright 51:24

yeah so. So the teams that work on that sort of worry about or care about things like we want people to subscribe, we want people to say subscribing, so we want to make sure you get things that you may not have found yourself. So it's discoverability, it's making sure things appear that, oh, I didn't know that or so. So we started with things like onward journeys to make sure that when you read an article about something, you would get, yeah, some semi, yeah, some semi-personalized, more cohort personalization about people like you or me had looked at this article, so we might like this. So they weren't personalized personalized partly because we weren't super comfortable with that in the early days, doing that anyway, and consumers weren't. You know a lot of consumers, actually, when they engage with an edited product, people to be saying that here's the thing. We decided. That is important because I think that's missing a lot in the world.

Toby Wright 52:19

So now, so we started on that and now and now we're embarking on on working out how to make the experience different for everybody.

Toby Wright 52:27

So not may not be necessarily the content, but the how you experience the content differently. So we're not changing the content, but we might just think well, you, you, perhaps, you like it in a index like this. Perhaps you like it like that, perhaps you only ever look at it on this kind of device, so we'll make sure you get images like that. So it's more about the, the experience, part of the personalization, and then I suspect at some point we'll get to the point where we will we'll dig into the actual content and but basically it's all about atomizing the, the content up and making sure and recombining it around what people are more interested in, what people don't want to spend time with. Um, rather than you go in and saying I like this, this and this and then you just get stories about that and that, trying to avoid that echo chamber of you know, if you read so many things about a certain topic, that's all you ever see and you never get out of it again.

Wendy Stonefield 53:19

So yeah, and content and and um context is also probably really important in that the mode that I'm in in the morning when I'm consuming your content on the way into work yeah is really different to where I am on a saturday afternoon or a sunday knowing all those sorts of things is really important.

Toby Wright 53:35

And then making sure that you know, but also making sure that you know, as we personalize the experience more and more, there are opportunities and and workflows so that the journalists and the editors can tweak the stuff and say no, that you know, boost things and unboost things and just sort of add in that human in the loop which is really important. You know the editorial intent of what we're trying to do.

Wendy Stonefield 54:00

Yeah, I think also, you know when I, when I think about your app, in particular, the um, the discussion that happens in relation to your content adds another dimension to the experience that you are providing um, and so I think you've got tremendous engagement with your. Yeah, I mean I've.

Toby Wright 54:20

This is terrible because I I took I took some new employees through this this morning. I can't remember the number. It's a phenomenal amount of comments we have on our afterwards like phenomenal below the line comments.

Personalization and Community Engagement

Toby Wright 54:31

Um, it's a, I mean it's just massive engagement. I mean it was a phenomenal number and you only have to look at sort of certain articles and you'll just see the ticker. Just do that like a real-time ticker of people commenting. So people are massively engaged and I think that's quite difficult to do with a machine. So, talking to each other and talking to our journalists, more and more we're going below the line and the journalists are involving themselves in that conversation as well, which is really important and that gets people to stay. That's a really important retention and engagement thing.

Wendy Stonefield 55:08

Yeah, really interesting, because I suppose there's a whole other dimension around, that of the Community is probably not the right word, but the Well, I think, if you think about, I think the editorial stance is it's a community, it is a community. It's a community.

Toby Wright 55:27

Yeah, it's a very specific community. I mean, you know we have over a million subscribers you know that's a big community who are paying to be in that community and there's real diversity.

Wendy Stonefield 55:39

You know as somebody who often contributes and you know somebody who, who often um contributes and um, you know, watches comments around specific topics that are of interest to me. There is great debate and diversity of thought and opinion within those, which is fantastic.

Toby Wright 55:53

People are very engaged. Yeah, people are engaged, um, and it's, you know, it's a, it's a, it's a good.

Wendy Stonefield 55:59

I like to create a good space for that um on our products yeah, great, thank you, um and um, what I I'm keen to be over. You know you've had this incredible career thus far. Um, what advice would you give to somebody who's wanting to get into a career in technology? Um, yeah, and is there any advice that you were given that you returned to regularly or pass?

Toby Wright 56:24

on. I wasn't given any advice about this because technology wasn't really a thing when I started doing it, so it was.

Toby Wright 56:33

I spent a lot of my time and giving up, frankly, trying to explain to people what I did for a living because it was. You know, back in mid-80s people didn't have email, didn't have yeah faxes, didn't have computers. People didn't have computers, didn't have phones. So it was. It's quite alien when I worked in a workplace a silicon valley company that those things we had in the office and it was a bit this is weird, it's like this is nobody else has.

Wendy Stonefield 56:57

It's a future.

Toby Wright 56:58

It's a future, yeah, um so I think, but you know, all the advice I got was say what you do and do what you say. You know really, you know, just just be or be yourself, and I was thinking this about this the other day. It's like and if you don't enjoy it, then and you and you can if you don't enjoy it, with a massive caveat of your situation allowing it, try and do something else. You know, don't just, don't just plow on. If you can do something else, do it, because you know it's like you can take.

Toby Wright 57:29

You can take some risks I mean, you know, it's easier for me to say, I guess, but, um, at my stage of the career, but it you know just, but just in try and find something you like doing, but but also, just, you know accountability for what you do as well. It's really important, you know, be accountable for everything you do, um, to yourself, to your family, to your colleagues, to your customers. I mean that that that stands in pretty good shape, I think, and sort of being able to sleep I think that's fantastic.

Wendy Stonefield 58:00

I think it's quite helpful. Yeah, look at yourself in the mirror.

Toby Wright 58:05

Yeah, pretty simple advice.

Wendy Stonefield 58:06

Yeah, very sound Toby, and you know us at and Digital. We all have our and titles. I would be very remiss if I didn't ask you if you had an and title, what would it be?

Toby Wright 58:20

And Vintage Synthesizer tinkerer probably sorry. Can you vintage synthesizer tink?

Wendy Stonefield 58:28

oh fantastic never had that, but I aim to please.

Toby Wright 58:33

So yeah, and, and I'm a big fan of synthesizers, but so now we know what you do on the weekend. I don't have very't have. I don't have very few and I'm a terrible musician, but I just love things. I'm a terrible musician.

Wendy Stonefield 58:47

That's, that's brilliant. Thank you for sharing that with us. Well, that is everything for this edition of the good, the bad and the ugly of digital transformation. Thanks again, toby. It's been fantastic to have you on. I've really enjoyed our conversation and if you have enjoyed this episode, please do follow or subscribe so you'll always know when there is a new episode. Thank you.