How do you take a 175-year-old newsroom and successfully launch it into the digital era? This is the challenge that the Globe and Mail faced in 2012, when we set up our paywall so that we could continue to fund ambitious, nation-building journalism.We had many problems:

When any news organisation starts down the path of paywalled content, one big question that they face is the question of what to paywall.Part of the challenge there is the tension between the public’s right to know useful information and the media company’s desire to restrict content that can drive revenue.

The Globe and Mail is Canada’s foremost news media company, leading the national conversation and effecting policy change through brave, independent journalism since 1844. The Globe’s award-winning coverage of business, politics and national affairs reaches six million readers every week in print and online. The Globe believes the future of journalism lies in its ability to bring readers the stories they both want and need to know. That’s why the company invested in innovation and data science, hiring data scientists from leaders in the tech industry to develop Sophi – an artificial intelligence platform for Natural Language Processing, prediction and optimization – and used it to automate the curation of content on its websites and digital properties.As the media industry grappled with shrinking resources over the past decade, The Globe and Mail was looking for ways to continue to fund and produce groundbreaking journalism. This meant ensuring reporters and editors had as much time as possible to explore and shape the content that would build a better Canada. It also meant finding a sustainable source of subscription revenue while preserving as much advertising revenue as possible.