• Research »
• CIO 100
  • White Papers
  • Tech Tool Kits
  • Analysis

The offices could easily pass for those of a Microsoft or a Google, both of which - not entirely coincidentally perhaps - are near neighbours to this Victoria, London site and former trading floor of stockbroker Salomon Smith Barney.

The escalator automatically starts into action when you stand on it and there are lozenges of colour that set off the towering glass structures all around, with images of the great and the good: Sir Richard Branson, Andre Agassi, Sir Anthony Hopkins, Linford Christie and Dame Judi Dench stare down into a reception boasting the requisite modern office accoutrements of soft furnishings and an island café.

The whole place is open plan with huge video screens tuned to digital news channels, displaying news feeds and even Twitter Tweets. You wouldn't have to be Loyd Grossman to work out that it might be a media company that lives in a house like this, but you might be surprised to learn that since a move from Canary Wharf in 2006 it has been home to Telegraph Media Group, publishers of the Daily Telegraph and Sunday Telegraph newspapers.

This is the company that has its best-known brand referred to as the ‘Torygraph' and is equated with (hopefully) fictitious, ancient readers such as Disgusted of Tunbridge Wells and Sir Bufton-Tufton, many of whom preferred the atlases when much of the world was pink. But the organisation is changing and it wants the world to know it, as the recent investigation into MPs expenses, which exposed even Tory shadow chancellor George Osborne. From being a print--dominated firm, the Telegraph Group aspires to be digitally-led, and from having an oldie demographic it seeks to recruit younger readers. The plan is to become an innovator in web publishing, taking full advantage of multimedia, immediacy, community and general dynamism of the online realm; hence these offices, new appointments, a redesigned workflow and partnerships with some of the biggest names in bleeding-edge technology.

For those of us of a certain age, what is striking about Telegraph 2.0 (a term one-time editor the late Bill Deedes certainly wouldn't have used) is its youth. Daily Telegraph Editor-In-Chief Will Lewis is in his late 30s and CIO Paul Cheesbrough is just 34.

Cheesbrough has squeezed a dense CV into his short working life. Born in London but raised in the Midlands (he remains a committed Aston Villa fan), Cheesbrough swooped way south to Bournemouth to take a degree that should be far more common in this country, combining business and technology and incorporating modules in risk management, business strategy and logistics, as well as pure IT and software development. "I must be one of the only people who still uses their -degree every day at work," he says.