4Newswall is the days headlines condensed into GIFs. Each GIF used the purity of an animated headline and distilled the news down to the heart of the story in a way that could also be engaging, entertaining, and at times irreverent. Housed on a bespoke tumblr page, where you could click through to learn more about the story, the homepage worked like a moving and evolving newspaper front page. Each GIF was crafted to be individually shareable as a stand alone piece of content. The headline would work in tandem with creative imagery to tell the story.

Launching near the UK general election we created daily GIF headlines posted on our bespoke Tumblr and pushed out across Twitter and Facebook. The homepage gives an overview of all the news in a hectic and busy manner, but with date filtering down the side. Each story is vying for the user’s attention and once the user picks a story that intrigues them, they can click the GIF view a succinct write up of the story, in a tone of voice we developed specifically to cater for this audience.

We also used our GIFs as supporting TV bulletins during our launch phase, in the form of a 10-20sec TV spot on E4 (the UK’s number one digital channel for 16-24 year olds) and Channel 4. They were created using the top GIFs of the day and pushing people to the site. The project ran for 9 months.

4Newswall is the first of it’s kind and in it’s first month reached over 4million people on social media. The site also got a click through rating 3 times higher than the average with an incredibly low bounce rate of 4.2%, which basically means when people came to the site, they stuck around.

This innovation project was part of a wider initiative to reach young people and has paved the way for new online video and social media content that has been of huge success in making Channel 4 News a genuine contender in online journalism