Publishers Daily: It’s rare for a newspaper to have a CTO. Why did The Seattle Times think it was a necessary post?

Butler: I joined ST in January 2014 and the company needed the traditional capabilities of a technology leader and a change agent, predominantly in systems that generate product offerings.

I come from a background that’s pretty diverse in the technology field, but one of my areas has been product development. I can look at challenges a company has and be very customer-centric -- our readers, our subscribers and our advertisers -- and devise new means of satisfying their consumption of our content product.

Publishers Daily: What was your main focus as the ST’s first CTO?

Butler: My initial emphasis was to transform the software stack and capabilities of how we manage and publish content digitally. We built partnerships with industry leaders and a digital foundation that is the content management system, which provides digital-first content creation for our digital products and integrates with the print workflow. Actually, I like to use “digital now” instead of “digital first.” It’s not what comes first for digital or those writing specifically for Web or mobile, but the reality of the way news is consumed on digital devices. It’s always “now,” always “on,” always “available” and always “current.”

We  focused on more breaking news opportunities and a constant, almost real time push of content out toward our digital products. We also released a new flagship SeattleTimes.com Web site in February 2015.

Publishers Daily: How are you treating The Seattle Times like a tech company?

Butler: We are thinking of our offerings as products. What we are doing is understanding that through technology, we are becoming more of a digital workforce that opens up opportunity to transform the things that we build and provide to our customers at a different pace than a traditional newspaper.

We have fully adopted a product management approach to what we build. The product management team works with the internal stakeholders in the newsroom, advertising and circulation department.

We divide our audience into seven distinct segments. We have “career focused urbanites;” “suburban social shoppers,” who have heavy Facebook users and online shoppers; “family focused socials,” who are usually around 35 and starting families and buying homes; “baby-boom loyalists,” who are print subscribers and they may not even touch our digital products -- their median age is 63 and their needs are shifting and printed paper needs to shift with it; “progressive urbanites,” who are around 52 and consume both print and digital; “young traditionals;” and “connected news techies,” who believe media should be free.

We also use personalization techniques that monitor and analyze a subscriber or reader’s behavior and serve up content that we believe to be aligned to the demographics of that reader. We can hone our product to audience behavior so that they become loyalists with our brand and with our offerings.

Publishers Daily: What other transformations will we see from ST this year?

Butler: This year’s emphasis is a program that we are calling our Audience Management Platform (AMP). This is the implementation of Zuora [a software company that help companies build subscription business models] so that we can better innovate around products, pricings and bundles. We offer these  through any device and any format that a consumer wants. They can personalize the content, the newsletters they want to receive, manage for print subscriptions and delivery options.

Publishers Daily: What are some new media strategies for 2016?

Butler: We have a major video push occurring right now. We have already deployed a vast improvement in our photo galleries and photo viewing. We are working to build a more robust video production internally and through partnerships. In social media, the hook into our offerings in many cases is oftentimes because of a photo or a video.

We also have some ideas around more verticalized applications that run on mobile. That might be for sports fans, entertainment enthusiasts, cooking enthusiasts, following the trends of the national media trends.

Publishers Daily: Will there be a focus on native or branded advertising?

Butler: We are innovating in the advertising area, as well. We are advancing our native advertising offerings, particularly in what I would categorize as “lite news,” like food, restaurants, travel and fashion. We are also working on ad products that use a high degree of analytics around who our readers are and tailor ads to the reader and pay for performance-type ads.