Tag : itv news

One of the fundamental principles we lived by throughout the process of redesigning the ITV News website was that we needed to ground what were doing in the real needs of users. Cath explained our approach in an excellent post a few weeks ago.

All too often on content management projects a very significant group of users are taken for granted: those who will create and manage the content. On this project, we were detemined that we would really try to understand the editorial experience in depth, and provide tools that fit the journalists’ requirements.

We started with a fascinating and intense day in the ITN newsroom with Jason Mills and his team. We were allowed to attend the morning editorial conference and busy journalists tolerated our interruptions and stupid questions throughout the day. Finally, we were allowed to have a nose around in the studio and then watch the ITV Evening News transmission from the gallery.

Alastair Stewart in the ITV News Studio

In all honesty I must log onto the BBC website and my local news website at least 20 times a day mostly through my smartphone or work computer, and I can honestly admit that I learnt more about today's events by logging onto this 3 times today

A guest blog by Robin Pembrooke, Managing Director online and on demand at ITV

A little over a year ago we kicked off the design process for our project to re-conceive and launch a brand new ITV News offering online. I'm writing on budget day 2012 and as we speak the product is up and running http://www.itv.com/news/, and being used by journalists around the country as the nation discovers what’s in store for the financial year ahead.

A combined team has delivered the project from Made by Many, ITV and ITN. Before we began there was much discussion internally about how much effort we should be putting into news online. Given the dominance of the BBC in the UK, the massive resources that the newspaper groups throw at it, and the general difficulty that everyone has in making money from online news, why would we bother?

On the left, a shot taken from the Home Page; on the right, the simple drag-and-drop Admin tool that was created for the newsroom. 

For the past ten months Made by Many has been working with ITV and ITN to transform ITV News into a multichannel news service by adding online, mobile and connected TV to broadcast television. Leading on a live news feed, the first web, mobile and tablet releases of a radically different digital news service went live on Monday 19th March. This is the story.