Sky News' Blueprint for Innovation: Focus, Partnerships, and Trust

Stop Doing Everything

Every media organization wants to innovate. The challenge is finding the time and resources to do it. At Sky News, that reality has become a central consideration as the company works toward its Sky 2030 vision.

Speaking at Arc XP’s Connect London event, Andy Thompson, Executive Director of Business Operations at Sky News Group, shared their focus on balancing the demands of a fast-moving newsroom with the need to experiment with new products, technologies, and audience experiences.

“There are so many people in the organization that have great ideas,” Thompson said. “There’s so much journalism that they would all love to be telling.”

But the answer is not simply doing more. It’s being more selective about where effort is spent. For Thompson, that means asking a difficult question: what work genuinely creates value, and what work can be reduced, automated, or approached differently?

“If the story we’re telling is ubiquitous or it’s delivered in a format that is ubiquitous, and you can just go on to Google Gemini and get a very similar answer, then maybe that’s not where we need to be spending our time.”

As audience expectations evolve and AI tools become more capable, media companies face increasing pressure to focus their resources on the journalism, formats, and experiences that set them apart.

Focus on What Makes You Different

For Sky News, that differentiator is video. Over the past year, the organization has increased its focus on video content throughout the newsroom, viewing it as an area where it has a meaningful advantage and a stronger opportunity to stand out. That focus is influencing not only the content being produced but also the way teams are organized and how stories move across platforms.

Historically, many broadcasters structured their operations around television as the primary destination for content. Today, Sky News is taking a broader view of how stories reach audiences.

“We’re almost starting from a digital video mentality of which TV is one expression of that,” Thompson said.

The distinction matters because audiences no longer engage with journalism through a single channel. Content may begin as a video package, become part of a podcast, appear within an app experience, and later find its way onto television. Rather than creating separate workflows for each destination, Sky is working toward a more fluid model that allows stories to move naturally across formats while maintaining a consistent editorial focus.

Let Technology Handle the Repetitive Work

Supporting that shift requires more than a change in mindset. It also requires tools that remove unnecessary friction from the production process. While discussions around AI often focus on transformative possibilities, Thompson highlighted a more practical benefit: helping journalists spend less time on repetitive tasks and more time creating journalism.

“So I suppose stop is partly to stop doing the administrative work or the work that is lower value or where the tools and the technologies can just make your jobs easier,” he said.

Examples include technology that automatically clips video content, reformats footage for different platforms, and adapts content between aspect ratios. Work that previously required multiple manual steps can increasingly be completed with greater speed and consistency. Thompson was clear, however, that these workflows still depend on editorial oversight. The objective is not to remove journalists from the process but to allow them to focus their expertise where it matters most.

“It’s all human in the loop,” he said.

Choose Partners for Everything Else

Technology can help organizations work more efficiently, but it cannot solve every challenge. Increasingly, media companies are recognizing that they do not need to build every capability themselves.

“I’ve always been a big fan of partnerships,” Thompson said. “I think better together is a general rule.”

That philosophy reflects a broader shift taking place across the industry. For many years, publishers viewed competitive advantage as something developed and protected internally. Today, many organizations are taking a more selective approach, choosing to concentrate resources on the areas that truly differentiate them while working with trusted partners to strengthen supporting capabilities.

“Where things can be done better, smarter around work that is not anything that differentiates us, still needs to be done brilliantly,” Thompson said. “Take advantage of the partners and the other organizations that can help you do that.”

The same thinking is extending beyond commercial partnerships and into industry collaboration. Sky News is one of the founding members of SPUR, the Standards for Publishing Usage Rights initiative, alongside organizations including the BBC, Financial Times, The Telegraph, The Guardian, and News Corp. The group was established to address questions surrounding publisher content and AI usage, an issue that affects the industry as a whole.

“As much as journalists like to compete and newsrooms like to compete, I think this is a conversation where actually we need to be coming together to solve a much bigger and more existential sort of industry-wide challenge,” Thompson said.

Trust Remains the Foundation

Despite the attention surrounding AI, new business models, and emerging audience behaviors, one priority continues to sit above everything else: trust.

“I think trust underpins absolutely everything,” Thompson said.

That principle has become increasingly important as audiences encounter a growing mix of AI-generated content, creator-led media, and information from sources that vary widely in credibility. Established news organizations still have an opportunity to differentiate themselves through trusted reporting, but doing so requires meeting audiences where they are and delivering journalism in formats they already use.

The media companies that thrive over the next decade are unlikely to be the ones that attempt to build everything themselves. More likely, they will be the organizations that understand what makes them distinctive, use technology to remove unnecessary complexity, and develop partnerships that allow them to move faster, learn faster, and focus more of their resources on serving audiences.