The Times and The Sunday Times

This year, The Times's goal was to create a joyous experience for readers on a mobile-phone screen and make it easier for them to discover the topics and authors that matter to them. This meant radical change: The Times rebuilt its website homepage, introduced nine new sections and completely rethought how to tell stories for mobile.

This project started with back-end publishing tools, and went all the way through to user experience and front-end design. The Times and Sunday Times newsroom underwent the biggest changes to its publishing tools in more than a decade, rolling out a new editorial planning tool (Kordiam), a new digital CMS (NewsPress), and a home-built AI agent (Co-Pilot) which helps editors with headlines, summaries and metadata. Editors can now easily 'drag and drop' into stories multimedia assets including videos, graphics and photography to enhance mobile-first storytelling, and preview all stories before they go live. Stories are rigorously tagged, making them easier to find within a new information architecture that better categorises the 1,400 stories we publish weekly in nine broad categories: UK, World, Comment, Business & Money, Sport, Life & Style, Culture, Puzzles and Magazines.

Each category contains sub-categories, such as “Travel” under Life & Style. This has helped discoverability in two ways: first, a more intuitive navigation, which has seen navigation usage treble; second, improved topical authority on Google search, where key categories such as Sport now routinely show up at the top of search results. The final piece of work was rethinking how to tell stories on mobile. The principles we mapped out include better linear storytelling, with multimedia (gifs, photography, graphics) integrated into each story at points where they advance the narrative. Each day we showcase at news conference an example of the best of our mobile-first storytelling to stimulate discussion on what works best on mobile. Great examples include the story about Britain got to its last day of coal power, The day coal died, How Trump won a US election like no other and Inside Chris Kaba’s criminal past. Since the changes, mobile now accounts for more than 70% of all digital subscriber reading, and the total number of digital subscribers has increased 5% in a year to more than 600,000.