Lee Wilkinson

Lee Wilkinson built his career helping traditional media become digital products.

Across the Financial Times, News UK, Hearst and Condé Nast, he worked in product, design, technology and strategy roles as publishing moved from print and websites into mobile, apps, subscriptions and increasingly sophisticated digital experiences. His work included products for the FT and The Times, before he went on to lead product strategy at Hearst and global product and design at Condé Nast.

He joined DC Thomson in 2020, initially leading product and technology across the group.
The challenge was familiar: how does a publishing company with more than a century of history build the technology, products and teams it needs for what comes next? Wilkinson has since helped lead DC Thomson’s wider digital transformation, including bringing Findmypast more closely into the group and building a more joined-up product and technology operation.

Then his professional experience met a much older personal interest.

Wilkinson has been a keen genealogist since childhood and has spoken about spending many hours visiting archives across the UK researching his own family history. In 2024, DC Thomson asked him to take executive responsibility for its History business alongside his CIO role.

That business now spans Findmypast and The Social History Archive, using technology to open up billions of family records, historical documents and digitised newspaper pages. Through Findmypast’s long-running partnership with the British Library, the British Newspaper Archive has now digitised more than 100 million newspaper pages that once largely required a physical visit to access.

It is still product development – just on a very different timescale.

Wilkinson spent much of his career helping publishing businesses work out how their content should live in the future.

Now part of his job is making sure the past can live there too.