TestTube News
company: discovery
role: director of programming development
At Discovery Digital Networks, our job as the development team was to create new programming, determining the format for the shows, the editorial tone, and production workflow. We would launch the shows, paying close attention to analytics and audience feedback in order to iterate on the original concept before handing productions over to other internal teams to manage.
We were given the assignment of developing a daily show for TestTube, DDN's successful vertical dedicated to science and curiosity. The goal was to expand TestTube's audience while remaining true to the brand. And because TestTube already had a flagship daily science show, DNews, we needed to explore another editorial path outside traditional science topics.
So we decided to lean into the theme of curiosity. We were a team of avid news junkies, but we saw a hole journalism. Terms like jihad, freedom of speech, and civil rights were included in the stories of the day, but there were a lot of gaps in our fundamental understanding of where these ideas came from, what they actually meant, and how they affected our lives. We created TestTube News to fill in these gaps and help "explain" the news, giving context for the stories in our media feeds.
TestTube News defined the genre that would later be adopted by Vox and AJ+ and has since been acquired by NowThisNews. Starting from scratch, TestTube News (currently NowThisWorld) today as over 1.8 million subscribers and over 500 million views across digital platforms.
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