How The Times Accelerated Their Publishing Workflow
The Times is Britain’s oldest daily national newspaper. First published in 1785 as the Daily Universal Register, and today a part of News UK, The Times and its sister paper, The Sunday Times, first published in 1822, remains one of the most influential news sources in the United Kingdom and around the world.
While still taking pride in its print edition, The Times, like many newspapers, has shifted much of their approach to digital-first in recent years, delivering its content on the web, in mobile apps, and via its popular classic tablet app.
In furtherance of its shift to an increasingly digital-first media landscape, The Times selected WordPress VIP as the backend of their digital experiences. Replacing a print-first CMS, The Times significantly improved their publishing workflow, began to retire unneeded services, streamlined their technical architecture, empowered their newsroom to get their stories out more effectively, and built a foundation for a newsroom of the future that leverages AI and other emerging technologies.
Key results
- 34% faster time-to-publish
- 62% fewer clicks to publish articles
- Training reduced from 2 days to 30 minutes
- Less technical complexity
- Sustainable foundation built for future reader experience enhancements
The challenge
Complicated, inconsistent workflows
The Times, like many in the media industry, has undergone a digital transformation in its business, with digital channels representing an ever-growing part of their readership. But their systems and technologies had often simply been extended from print-first solutions. The Times realized they had an opportunity to adopt a digital-first approach, putting additional investment in the quality of their digital offering, rather than a secondary consideration after print workflows.
“For many years we were using the same CMS across print and digital,” said Luke Sikkema, Head of Editorial Operations at The Times. “It worked well for print, less so for digital. It took far too many tools and tabs to publish a story. For a typical article, people were manually cutting and pasting between three to seven Google docs to reach the final publishing schedule for the day. Each desk had their set of Google docs, and the publish team had another set to manage across desks. We were constantly creating new Google docs to manage the other Google docs that sat beneath them. It’s doable individually, but when you’re doing this more than 200 times a day and there’s not a consistent file flow, it becomes very difficult.”
From a technology perspective, The Times’s publishing tooling was complex to manage and cumbersome to innovate around. It required specialist product knowledge to build on, which made recruitment and onboarding a lengthy, unpredictable process.
“A central pillar of our Technology strategy was to standardize our services and adopt industry-recognised tooling wherever possible,” said Umer Ehsan, Director of Content Systems at News UK. “The existing CMS operated as part of a ‘headless’ publishing workflow, so the challenge was magnified by the need to deliver a new, world-class CMS without compromising or impacting our front end products”.
Several other News UK and News Corp publications, such as The Sun, The New York Post, and Dow Jones, were already using WordPress VIP, which created a compelling backdrop to moving The Times to WordPress too.
Additionally, the majority of News Corp’s publications were already benefiting from standardized and reusable WordPress plugins built and centrally managed by NewsPress, a global program within News Corp. NewsPress is responsible for catalyzing the development of newsroom solutions that maintain and advance the journalistic capabilities, technical superiority, and profitable growth of all News Corp brands.
“By standardizing across News Corp and News UK, we can put more effort into building plugins and capabilities that benefit all our publications,” Monica Mina, Director of Product Development, CMS & Publishing Products at News Corp, agreed.
“Our goal is simple: ‘Don’t build twice.’ We wanted to make sure whatever we build for the Times can be used elsewhere. This way they can leverage what we’ve already built for our publications and drive collaboration across our business units around the world.”
But standardization is sometimes easier said than done. “There had been previous attempts to shift The Times in this direction,” said Ehsan. “But things don’t happen overnight at a 200-year-old newsroom. You have to take your partners on the journey with you—technology change can’t be done to editorial, it has to be done with editorial.”
“When it comes to technology, the vast majority of journalists don’t really give it too much thought,” Sikkema added. “They just want to get their story written, compiled, and out into the world in the fastest way possible. I need to build a bridge with the editorial platforms team that enables the journalists to buy into what we’re doing and to see the value in modern publishing tools. Every department has different needs, from senior editors to the picture desk to our audience team.”
The solution
A new, faster publishing workflow
The Times had already experimented with WordPress in a few ancillary projects, such as Times Travel and The Times Money Mentor. They wanted to move more broadly to a new publishing workflow including WordPress VIP.
“With a tool like WordPress, we knew we could reduce the number of tools and tabs that it took to publish a single story so we could get it published faster,” said Sikkema. “An intuitive interface would be a real game changer for us. When I first saw the Gutenberg Block Editor back in 2019 I thought ‘this is what I had in mind for an intuitive editing experience.”
The Times in parallel, also adopted a new planning tool, Desk-Net. While Desk-Net integrated directly with WordPress out of the box, The Times took it one step further with some custom development to really deliver a seamless transition from planning to publishing. Everything could be tracked and monitored in one place and editing in WordPress was just an extra function–journalists could just press a button to enter the Block Editor, the place where content is created in WordPress.
To build out their new digital workflow, News UK Technology partnered with NewsPress to pull together a world-class WordPress engineering team to jointly develop the solution and roll out The Times implementation of WordPress VIP. Together, they recruited WordPress engineers within News UK to form the core of the team and enlisted Big Bite Creative, a WordPress VIP Gold Partner, to provide specialist expertise and accelerate development.
“We aimed to enhance our skills and talent and leverage the best from our tech teams,” said Ehsan. “The NewsPress and Big Bite teams provided that expertise and had a proven track record, having successfully delivered digital-first CMS solutions for Barron’s, MarketWatch, and The Wall Street Journal. It was immediately clear that they loved working with publishers and understood the inner workings of a newsroom, finding solutions to their unique challenges,” added Sikkema.
Managing change, winning hearts and minds
To be successful, The Times knew they had to manage the rollout in a controlled manner that brought the whole organization with them. “In many ways it’s more a people challenge than a technical one,” said Sikkema. “You need to win hearts and minds and ensure that you don’t just push technology, but that everything both upstream and downstream is ready to adopt.”
In summer 2022, The Times decided to start small with weekly magazines. By November 2022, The Sunday Times Magazine and its Law section were using the new CMS and workflow. Along the way, they incorporated feedback from their editorial teams. Having worked through these initial targets, they set a goal of moving the newsroom over by 2023.
“You can’t transition 500 journalists in a week,” said Sikkema. “It takes training, communication, and coordination.” Furthermore, the transition had dependencies on replatforming The Times Classic tablet app. WordPress VIP would have to integrate with the new platform, which would move the app from a manually curated experience to one integrated with the core website. Any disruption could mean substantial churn from this loyal audience. And delays in the platform’s update would further compress the timeline.
The groundwork laid, both in the newsroom and on the Classic app, meant things progressed rapidly. In October 2023, only 5% of all digital article output was done via WordPress VIP. By December, it was more than 99%.
A better approach powering multiple digital experiences
The impact of the change was dramatic and immediate. The article time-to-publish on the new WordPress VIP-based solution was 34% faster than the prior workflow. This was chiefly due to how integrated the whole workflow was, which reduced the number of clicks required to publish by 62%.
“The feedback from the newsroom was great,” said Sikkema. “Most agreed ‘this is dead easy.’ In fact, whereas we previously needed two days of training to get journalists up and running on our old solution, we now train them in half an hour.”
WordPress VIP now underpins multiple digital experiences across channels for The Times. A headless architecture and pulling content via WordPress VIP’s APIs, the CMS now powers The Times website, Classic, iPad, and iPhone apps, and other digital experiences.
“Historically we’ve had a complicated set of services to maintain,” said Ehsan. “Simplification of the tech stack and the publishing pipeline is a major initiative for us—we’ll now be able to deprecate a number of legacy systems. We’ll be consolidating multiple properties on a single infrastructure and moving other WordPress sites to WordPress VIP.”
The Times’ adoption also aligned with News Corp’s push for global standardization. “We operate a central team that can consult with and offer services to our various business units and I moved to London for a few months to help The Times through the transition but now they are fully running on their own,” said Mina.
“Now our NewsPress core team can focus on the central core features and plugins that we all use across business units. That helps us enhance our core product while reducing unnecessary work and cost.”
Furthermore, because WordPress VIP is built on open source technology, The Times benefits from their engagement with the WordPress community. “We will contribute more to WordPress Core,” said Ehsan. “We benefit from a global community that’s using and testing these capabilities so we don’t always have to. The more we can reduce our unique footprint and align with Core, the less we have to manage ourselves. It benefits both us and the community.”
Next steps: Future newsroom leveraging automation and AI
While the shift to WordPress VIP delivered immediate benefits and sped up publishing, it also provides a foundation for The Times’s vision of the future newsroom. “WordPress VIP will pave the way for some of the more impactful reader-facing initiatives that are coming down the line this year,” said Sikkema. “We intend to relaunch the navigation of our front end products, and adopt a new site architecture with new sections and subsections. We need to be ready to support that.”
The Times is also looking to build out the richness of their articles and embrace more multimedia strategies, including how they weave audio and video into new article templates built on WordPress VIP. “Ultimately it will let us build out new formats, templates, and experiences so we can tell those stories in different ways,” said Sikkema.
The Times is also looking to integrate new artificial intelligence (AI) technologies into their processes to both streamline the publishing process and improve the reader experience. “We want to, for example, give our journalists the ability to harness the power of AI to reduce time-consuming tasks,” said Ehsan. “Doing that in a legacy, client-based tool would have been very difficult. WordPress VIP makes that sort of integration possible for us.”
“Our vision of the future newsroom is reducing our number of tools and eliminating manual tasks to unlock the full potential of our newsrooms,” added Mina.
“Moving the Times and other business units out of a print-first CMS and into the NewsPress digital-first CMS, built on WordPress VIP, laid the foundation for our future plan. We’ve cleared the path for where we want to go.”
Overall, WordPress VIP has changed and enhanced the publishing process, powers multiple experiences, and provides a foundation for the next step in The Times digital evolution. “We’ve made a big bet on WordPress VIP,” said Ehsan. “We’ve added some fantastic people to our team and are building a real world-class center of expertise for WordPress. We set challenging deadlines, won the buy-in of the newsroom and despite a frenetic year, we’ve hit our organizational goals and are well-positioned for what comes next.”