Gannett, Chief Data Officer: Digital Transformation in Media Happened More Organically

Amina Al Sherif: Hello and welcome to the CDO Magazine Interview Series. My name is Amina Al-Sharif, and I am with the Data Ethics Consortium for Security. Today, I have the pleasure of talking with Nate Rackiewicz, Chief Data Officer at Gannett. So, let's go ahead and get started. Nate, it's really nice to see you at this interview today. Why don't you go ahead and give a brief introduction of yourself for our audience.

Nate Rackiewicz: Sure! Thanks! I really appreciate it. I've got a last name that I like to tell people about when my family complains about it — I say it's presidential because there was a president Rackiewicz of Poland at one point.

Thank you though. I'm from Washington, D.C, originally. I grew up in Northern Virginia, went to college in the Midwest, came to New York City after college and have been here in the New York City area —  and with COVID, in the New Jersey area — since. I'm really excited to be here!

I'm Chief Data Officer at Gannett, part of the USA Today Network. If you're not familiar with that, it's USA Today plus about 250 local publishers around the country, plus publications around the world. I think that we've got one of the largest footprints of both local news and national news that's out there. And I think it's a wealth of amazing content here at Gannett. And I'm thrilled to be part of this. 

Al Sharif: As a brief background on me, I do come from a Defense background, so, it will be interesting to see how the media piece of things plays into tech and transformation, and data science, in the Defense space, too.

I'll try to point those items out when I see them. But let's start with the first question around  digital transformation and how to accelerate digital transformation in an organization. My question to you, Nate, is how hard or easy was it to introduce data science as a practice to the media industry? Was it considered a more innovative pivot that might've been met with resistance or was the vertical already kind of well established and migrating toward a data-centric model organically within the vertical that you work in? 

Rackiewicz: I would say that digital transformation or data transformation is very difficult for any company to go through. I would say that in my experience, across multiple media companies, it grew more organically rather than a bi,g top-down, monumental shift. If you think about how something like that grows organically, it depends on the media company. I've been in the television industry, both on the subscription side and on the advertising side, spent some time in radio, spent some time in video games, and spend some time now in news publishing. The drive for that organic growth is different in different areas. So if you think about data, it's there to enable that digital transformation, and that digital transformation is there to enable a business outcome.

If I go back and think about digital transformation, my earliest mix with that was probably in college. I managed the campus radio station at the University of Notre Dame and it was just a regular broadcast station. And I worked with the administration there to move it onto the internet. Streaming was my first real taste of digital transformation. After college, I ended up going to HBO and spent about 18 years there and went through that whole digital transformation. I was fortunate to work on Mike Gabriel's team over there. He was the CIO, the person that really envisioned the HBO Go platform and built it internally within his own team.

Being part of that team and seeing that whole digital push and the launch of HBO Go back around 2010 was really a blessing. I learned just so much from that, but also the unique data that helped enable that was different than the data that would enable it in radio. Over at A&E Networ —k where I went after HBO — they hired me to build out a center of excellence for data science and advanced analytics.

A&E Networks by that time had already started their streaming products. But what was unique in their transformation was that they were working on subscription-based products. I got to be part of the team that was enabling the launch of a product called History Vault for History Channel, and Lifetime Movie Club for Lifetime.

When I went over to the video game industry, digital transformation there was different than what I just described at the prior two places, because the big push for digital was happening in the midst of an industry where the physical product was how you shipped games to consumers. And that big digital transformation was from physical product to digital distribution. And that also enabled all of the online capabilities. So, if you think it through, at Take Two Interactive — the home to Grand Theft Auto — Grand Theft Auto Online is this massive universe of content. That was the transformation that was going on there.

That really steps them into this whole conversation around the metaverse. Their CEO in their last earnings call was saying, “Hey, look — there's this big buzzword out there called metaverse that everybody's going after.” And he just simply pointed out that they’ve got the biggest metaverse in the world, within the video game space.

Really neat stuff but different drivers. When you think about digital transformation and you think about the analytics that enable it, what I try to advocate for is a common analytics journey. And that journey goes from descriptive analytics to predictive analytics to prescriptive analytics.

On the descriptive side, that simply means what happened. On a predictive side, you're trying to answer the question of what will happen. On the prescriptive side, you're trying to answer the question “What should happen?”  And data science plays a role in each of those. For instance, data analytics to drive descriptive analytics, and to answer the question of what happened, is key. As you get into predictive and prescriptive analytics, that's really where this role of data science steps in. When we bring together data science, here's your hardcore math skills, your science skills, and all that..

And I love that you have a military background because this whole analytics journey is actually very personal. I grew up in the DC area and my dad was a nuclear engineer. He worked for naval reactors in the U.S. Navy. My mom worked on Capitol Hill. My dad worked for the Department of Defense. I was the oldest of six kids. 

I'd have a simple algebra question in high school, and I needed my dad’s help with it. Then I'd go to him and I'd say dad I need help with this. And 45 minutes or an hour later, he's teaching me about the foundations of calculus. 

I think about another brilliant person in my family, my grandfather on my mother's side. He spent his career in the U.S. Army, and worked in military intelligence at the Pentagon. If you've done that military intelligence type of work, you're just swimming in just loads of data and analytics.

I remember as a kid, visiting him in Southern Virginia. He's over there buried in these mountains of data that he's looking through, sifting through. And he turns to me and says, “Come here, I'm gonna show you something.” And he shows me all this data. He's got his pencil and he's doing this on paper — he's showing me how he methodically goes through and analyzes data, looking for insights. And I just found that fascinating. When you think about that analytics journey, it's data analytics, like what he was teaching me. In military intelligence, it's math and science like my dad was teaching me. Even though I was just trying to answer some simple questions. 

When you think about the work that they were doing, how does that apply in the media space? Well, all of these things are in service to something else. How was the work they were doing in service to the outcome they were trying to achieve with math science analytics? Well, the outcome there was national security. Data science was in service to national security. So, when I think about the businesses that I've been in HBO, what was that in service to?

Al Sharif: The masses watching HBO. HBO Go is one of the most used services. I feel like now it’s a platform. 

Rackiewicz: It turned into that. They rebranded it to HBO Max,  which they're taking global now. And I think you're right. I think the outcome is a premium content experience for consumers.