Corporate News
The Globe and Mail Selects AWS as its Preferred Cloud Provider
Canada’s leading news brand delivers new experiences for readers and improves operational efficiencies leveraging AWS machine learning and analytics services
August 14, 2019
Today, Amazon Web Services, Inc. (AWS), an Amazon.com company (NASDAQ: AMZN), announced that The Globe and Mail, Canada’s most read print/digital newspaper, has selected AWS as its preferred cloud provider and as its standard for artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) workloads. Rapid adoption and experimentation with a range of AWS ML services including Amazon SageMaker, Amazon Comprehend, Amazon Rekognition, and Amazon Textract have helped reporters and editors at The Globe to more effectively find, tell, and promote stories that matter to their audience without the need for manual review, custom code, or machine learning experience. The Globe also uses Amazon Polly, turning readers into listeners by converting text articles to audio in English, French, and Mandarin, including the newly unveiled Amazon Polly Newscaster voices.
The Globe runs applications like its popular recommendation engine and its proprietary Sophi predictive analytics platform on AWS. The Sophi platform uses AWS services, including Amazon SageMaker, to unlock value by learning how readers respond to and engage with content. Using machine learning systems trained by news editors, it can predict how valuable a story is likely to be prior to publication. This helps the team identify which stories should go behind a paywall, as well as which content should be promoted, when, where, and for how long. ML is touching every piece of the newspaper from improving staff efficiency, to creating new experiences for customers, to building new lines of business. The Globe is using Amazon SageMaker, a fully managed service that provides every developer and data scientist with the ability to build, train, and deploy machine learning models quickly, to build models to retain existing customers and acquire new ones.
“The Globe and Mail is investing heavily in data science and artificial intelligence. From our new audio feature running on Amazon Polly, to the Sophi predictive analytics platform, we are seeing great value in using AWS’s AI and ML services,” said Greg Doufas, Chief Technology and Digital Officer, The Globe and Mail. “The Globe originally built Sophi for its own use, but has since begun offering Sophi as a service to other news organizations. With AWS, we are able to bring our tech experts and editorial leadership together to innovate and bring new ideas to the newsroom to provide great experiences for our readers.”
“The Globe has been delivering Canada’s news since 1844, and is known for its focus on being a customer-focused organization that puts the needs of its readers first. As a leader in the industry, it is driven by an understanding that it needs to continue to innovate on behalf of their readers and is setting the tone for what’s possible with the world’s leading cloud,” said Eric Gales, Director of Commercial Sales, Amazon Web Services Canada, Inc. “The Globe is an avid user of many of our AI and ML services, as it continues to provide new experiences for their readers to enjoy the award-winning content produced by their editorial staff.”