ITV News

Transforming the newsroom & experience to drive exponential growth

Our impact

Services

Summary

Made by Many's reinvention of ITV News online as a Twitter-like livestream of updates increased traffic by more than 2200%; it also transformed ITV News' capabilities, making it the fastest breaking-news service in the UK.

The challenge

ITV came to us with an impossible brief: create a digital news service from scratch that could compete with BBC News, Sky, The Guardian, Telegraph, and Daily Mail. The constraints were brutal - just 16 weeks to launch from a blank sheet of paper, with a team that could only grow by 12 people.

Traditional news sites were stuck in a static page-based model - everything looked the same. ITV's digital presence didn't reflect their award-winning TV news operation. We needed to exploit competitors' weaknesses while playing to ITV's strengths as a producer of high-quality news video.

What we did

Our strategy was founded in observation. We'd seen Al Jazeera's live blogging success during the Arab Spring and noticed the volume of raw updates ITV reporters produced for polished 6 o'clock stories. The core question: what if all news was a stream, filtered by story, that open-sourced the reporters' notebook?

We prototyped multiple versions with journalists to design editing tools that let them focus on news gathering. This testing created confidence in our daring solution and eliminated fears that streaming meant more work - instead, journalists found greater personal exposure and opportunities to own breaking news. We built the fastest editorial production tool in the business using lean principles.

Impact

We launched within that impossible 16-week deadline. The platform handled 900,000 visitors in 5 minutes during Euro 2012 while staying stable. Publishing time was under 2 minutes - making ITV the fastest breaking-news service in the UK. ITV regularly "scooped" Sky and the BBC online.

Traffic grew explosively to 1.3 million users in a single day, with 45% coming through mobile. ITV News won best design at the Online Media Awards and became an influential model adopted globally. We fundamentally transformed the newsroom from broadcast-centric to web-first, introducing a lean product mindset that spread throughout the business.