An open-source editor for ITV News and structured content

ITV News needed an editor that could keep up with newsrooms. Journalists were publishing diverse content (rich media, embeds, breaking updates) all under deadline pressure. The WYSIWYG editors of the time produced messy markup, fought against structured content, and made it nearly impossible to build flexible, multi-platform publishing workflows.

Designed and built in collaboration with the ITV News editorial team, Sir Trevor is a modular, block-based editing framework that solved these problems. It was later open-sourced and has been used in thousands of projects worldwide.

WYSIWYG was the only option in 2014

Newsrooms move fast. Journalists need to publish diverse content, rich media, embeds, and breaking updates, all under deadline pressure. The WYSIWYG editors of the time were built for a different era. They produced messy markup, fought against structured content, and made it nearly impossible to build flexible, multi-platform publishing workflows.

Structuring content for reuse

Sir Trevor is a modular, block-based editing framework. Instead of a single rich-text blob, content is composed from discrete blocks: text, images, video, embeds, quotes, each with its own structure and behaviour.

This made content portable. The same article could render differently on web, mobile, and syndication feeds because the underlying data was clean and structured, not a tangle of HTML.

The interaction design was shaped by sitting with journalists in the newsroom and watching how they actually worked. Most editing tools at the time assumed you had time to fiddle with formatting. Journalists don't. They need to get words and media published under pressure, and anything that slows that down gets worked around or ignored entirely. Sir Trevor was built to stay out of the way, letting journalists focus on the story rather than fighting the tools.

Open source and beyond

After launching at ITV News, Sir Trevor was open-sourced. The community ran with it:

• Adopted across thousands of projects worldwide
• Became a reference point for the block-based pattern that influenced tools like Gutenberg

Framework ports

The community ported Sir Trevor to a range of backend frameworks:

Check out the repo at github.com/madebymany/sir-trevor-js.