MSNBC Buys Newsvine
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Written By Sepideh Saremi | October 8, 2007 | Share This
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MSNBC has acquired social news site Newsvine for an undisclosed sum. This is the first-ever acquisition by the Microsoft-NBC Universal venture since its start 11 years ago. The Newsvine blog’s announcement assures users it’ll continue to be business as usual at the site, “Though, and completely unrelated to the acquisition by msnbc.com, we have been considering making an adjustment to the way contributors are compensated based on suggestions from users.”
The New York Times notes that the buy boosts MSNBC in its competition with other news sites:
The acquisition of Newsvine will improve MSNBC.com’s positioning among its chief rivals, Yahoo News, AOL News and CNN. Of the three, AOL allows comments on every article, and CNN actively promotes its citizen journalism initiative.
However, it’s not yet clear how, exactly, Newsvine will be leveraged by MSNBC, and what ethics may need to be hammered out. The NYT further notes:
[Newsvine] will also have ties to the news division of NBC — which potentially raises some journalistic questions for Newsvine’s new corporate siblings. When shots were fired at Virginia Tech in April, a Newsvine user whose wife works on the campus posted a news report 22 minutes before The Associated Press, Mr. Davidson said.
Would MSNBC.com publish the user’s report? Mr. Tillinghast said it would have to be verified first.
“But we would never say, ‘We’re not going to put that up because it came through Newsvine.’ In fact, just the opposite,” Mr. Tillinghast said. “We see Newsvine as an excellent source of stories for MSNBC.com.”
Tillinghast makes a good point, but since Newsvine is public, isn’t it an excellent source of stories for everyone? Prior acquisitions of social media sites (like Conde Nast’s acquisition of Reddit, Ebay’s of StumbleUpon, and Yahoo’s of del.icio.us) appear to have functioned as stand-alones within the parent company. However, MSNBC’s role as a major breaking news provider means there’s potential for more interesting convergence, even though Newsvine’s nature means that anyone’s stories are promoted, and any scoop doesn’t belong solely to MSNBC.
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