Paul Cheesbrough, the current CIO of UK publishing giant News International, is to become chief technology officer of parent company News Corp.
Cheesbrough, who joined News International in 2010, will replace current CTO John McKinley, who has been in the role since February 2011.
According to the Financial Times, Cheesbrough’s new role will be a "hybrid of the chief digital officer and chief technology officer roles", suggesting responsibility for both back-end systems and customer facing web and ecommerce systems.
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As well as overseeing the introduction of paywalls to the Times and Sunday Times newspaper websites, Cheesbrough has been a vocal advocate of software as a service and cloud computing. News International uses Salesforce.com and Google Apps.
In June, News Corp’s board of directors approved a plan to split the company into a publishing division and an entertainment division. The FT reports that Cheesbrough, who was previously CIO of the Telegraph Media Group, is likely to join the publishing unit after the split.
Cheesbrough was linked to the company’s phone hacking scandal in February of this year, when it emerged in legal documents that he had authorised the deletion of two email archives. Laywers representing actress and phone hacking victim Sienna Miller had explicitly demanded that the company retain any emails relevant to her case against the company.
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News International eventually settled its phone hacking cases out of court.
