Under the new deal, which was announced earlier this month, the TV news service will continue to be produced for Channel 4 News, More 4 News and News at Noon as well as enhanced web and mobile news services until the end of 2010.
The new contract also includes plans for a new Beijing bureau, extra correspondents in Africa and Asia, more than 20 additional newsroom jobs and a new newsroom at ITN in London.
The Channel 4 News site already publishes blogs, podcasts and Jon Snow's daily 'Snowmail' email newsletter. It also ran a popular Factcheck tool in 2005 that monitored and checked claims made by political organisations and corporations reported in daily news coverage.
New content will include user surveys, new blogs - including one by arts correspondent Nick Glass - and a TV news service for mobiles. Interactive Flash bulletins will be introduced which will link stories to relevant maps, background information and timelines.
Martin Fewell, deputy editor of ITN News, oversees development of Channel 4's multimedia services and says integrating the team with the broadcast journalists is essential.
"We're primarily in the business of creating high-quality news video with original reportage, analysis and insight from our journalists and presenters," he told journalism.co.uk.
"We think that has still got to be our great strength online. The BBC has dozens of people to produce online content but that's divorced from the people that produce TV.
"We're much smaller than the BBC but our TV journalists are responsible for making multimedia content happen. We've got to utilise all our expertise and if we had separate departments, it wouldn't be good."
The BBC feeds user expectation of free content
Channel 4 News removed its paid-for Real video service last year; the move away from paid content was an acknowledgment that the pay-per-view model is not viable for most online news.
"There is so much free video out there - from the BBC in particular - that there's simply not a great commercial future in trying to charge people, however good or original your video is," said Mr Fewell.
"Essentially this is an environment where people are used to getting most of their news for free on the net, and to get the traffic you have got to compete on those terms."
Scrapping the paid-for video service has triggered a considerable increase in viewing figures on the site, he said. Growing broadband use is encouraging more web users to watch video online but readers expect a lot more from the website. They might want to know more about the presenters, what went into the production of a report and what was not included because of the time constraints of TV broadcasting.
"Whilst our journalists are expert in conveying the crucial information in a very short space of time, there is still a lot of value to be added online," he said.
In particular, news organisations have struggled to introduce blogs because of an assumption that blogging is inherently about opinion and comment.
"There's a structural issue with it because they associate blogs with opinion and polemic, but to me blogs are a different way of writing - more impressionistic, personal, one-to-one and with a different narrative voice," said Mr Fewell.
"It's our intention to use that blogging template not just for one story, but across everything we are doing and involving as many people as possible who are out working on stories for us."
Producing multimedia content does not necessarily mean retraining journalists as blogging and filing audio and video from the field content is straightforward, and the multimedia team look after the most-demanding technical aspects.
The recent Channel 4 Iran special was an opportunity for the news team to explore more multimedia coverage. Blogs, podcasts and direct emails from the news team in Tehran added extra depth to the broadcast coverage; correspondent Lindsey Hilsum wrote about Iran's political power struggle in a piece that would have been very hard to cover for TV.
A different video environment
Delivering video content online requires a different approach, said Mr Fewell; the experience of watching video on a PC, for example, is not the same as watching video on TV.
"It requires us to think slightly differently about the nature of that video - how that video links across to text, to other contributions from reporters, or to the background of a piece. It's a real challenge that broadcasters are only just coming to terms with."
Publishers and broadcasters initially had a naive approach to the web, Mr Fewell said.
"When the internet took off, there was the naïve view that you'd take TV, radio or print content and shove it out in a different medium."
Podcasting is another challenge for broadcasters, and one that should be more than just time-shifting radio content.
"The BBC has taken chunks of radio and turned them into podcasts. It's great content and a good way to listen for some people, but not really using the content in a new way," he said.
The value of user-generated content
User-generated content will be part of the Channel 4 News package, with material mainly used to add first-hand accounts and ideas to stories.
Mr Fewell said there can be occasions when user-generated content is very important but only for the relatively few stories the big cameras cannot get to. The foot and mouth crisis was the watershed for user-generated content at ITN when ITN sent cameras out to people on farms they could not reach.
"It became clear that user content had a significant role to play in informing our own understanding of the story, and about people generating story ideas," he said.
"But what we do is break our own stories and do our own original reports - which very often takes a lot of time, effort and specialist expertise to create."
It's about working out where the value is in user-generated content.
"There are certain moments when that value is very high - footage of Buncefield, for example - but it is still a requirement for professional journalists to assess whether that content adds to the story or not. And later that day, broadcasters were using professional content and that's because of the quality involved."
Rather than employing a dedicated team to solicit, edit and distribute user-generated content, as the BBC does, he said the key is to get the journalists themselves to understand how valuable submissions are.
"For three or fours years now, we have been encouraging people to look at our external email address which pulls in dozens of video bits each day.
"People are now attuned to look at that while we're on air, pulling in angles on stories."
Mr Fewell said that ITN's journalists understand a new responsibility to work with multimedia, rather than thinking of it as "a few people working in the corner of the office".
• ITN last week announced a partnership with mobile phone operator Vodafone to provide a 24-hour news and weather service for 3G customers. The service is produced by ITN's multimedia department and will send subscribers updates every 15 minutes.
• The BBC is planning to broadcast News 24 online by this summer, according to MediaGuardian. Some sports coverage may have to be cut for the streamed version if a rights issue cannot be resolved. Selected News 24 video is already available online, as well as three-minute bulletins and the BBC's three main news programmes.
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