REDMOND, Wash. - Msnbc.com is diving into citizen journalism and social media by acquiring Newsvine.com, a small but innovative player in what is known as “participatory journalism.”
It is msnbc.com’s first acquisition in its 11-year history.
Neither of the companies would disclose terms of the all-cash transaction, which was announced Sunday, but deals for other social media sites have ranged as high as the $75 million that eBay was reported to have spent for StumbleUpon.com, which claims about 3½ times the number of users as Newsvine.
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Newsvine CEO Mike Davidson will report to Charlie Tillinghast, president of MSNBC Interactive News and publisher of msnbc.com, but otherwise, Newsvine will continue to operate independently, Tillinghast said.
Tillinghast said msnbc.com was racing to foster a community among its readers and to exploit the power of unmoderated user commentary and ranking of the news. Ideally, he said in an interview, the site would design and build its own tools, but Newsvine, a small, lean company headquartered in downtown Seattle a few minutes from msnbc.com’s newsroom, “is just a great fit.”
“Newsvine is local, small, nimble — they don’t come with a lot of things you don’t want,” he said, such as complicated partnerships and contracts. “There isn’t a lot to rearrange.”
Sreenath Sreenivasan, a specialist in new media at the Columbia University journalism school, said the deal was a good fit for both companies.
“As the news environment is changing so quickly, it’s important for more traditional media companies to take advantage of some of these newer technologies,” Sreenivasan said.
For Newsvine’s part, “it makes sense for them to look at msnbc and msnbc’s parent companies [Microsoft Corp. and NBC Universal] as a place where they would have a way to really make a difference,” he said.
Deal pushes msnbc.com into community
With just more than a million monthly users, Newsvine not only is dwarfed by its new parent, which attracts more than 29 million users a month, but it also widely trails such competitors in the news-social media field as Digg.com, Reddit.com and the latest incarnation of Netscape.com as a social news site.
But the site has generated significant buzz since its launch in March 2006 because of its inventive merger of mainstream reporting from The Associated Press and ESPN; the contributions of individual users, who are paid for their writing; and the social media model of user-driven ranking of the news.
That buzz, and the technology behind it, are what msnbc.com is buying. While msnbc.com has long ranked among the three most popular news sites on the Web, it has been late to the game in expanding its offerings in user participation and non-professional reporting.
“Msnbc isn’t as strong in community as it needs to be,” Tillinghast said. Newsvine offers “a lot of interesting features” that he hopes to “evaluate and port to msnbc ... rather than us creating a feature they already have,” he said.
For Newsvine, the immediate attraction is direct access to msnbc.com’s audience and distribution power.
“While Newsvine may be well known in early adopter circles, we want every college student, every farmer, every weekend journalist, and every household to have their own branch on the ’Vine,” the company said in a statement.
Newsvine will piggyback on msnbc.com’s data centers, giving it vastly more server power and reliability, which Davidson said in an interview had been the site’s most significant challenge.
“The ability to deal with gigantic spikes of traffic is a tough thing for any start-up to handle,” Davidson said. “We can learn a lot from the people in Redmond.”
New direction for news site
The deal, which had been in the works since May, comes as a number of news aggregators and social media sites are eroding large media Web sites’ control of their distribution. More and more frequently, users come to individual articles on sites like msnbc.com and newyorktimes.com from portals like Google News or social media intermediaries like Digg; Reddit, which is owned by Wired.com; Del.icio.us, which is owned by Yahoo.com; and StumbleUpon.com.
They are also being challenged by a robust “citizen journalism” movement that is providing a growing forum for non-professionals to gather and report news without filtering it through a team of editors and the bureaucracy of a large news organization.
The purchase of Newsvine gives msnbc.com a foot in both worlds.
“It begins what I believe is the revolution that big sites like msnbc need to go through,” said Merrill Brown, chairman of the citizen journalism site NowPublic.com, which boasts 100,000 “contributing reporters” around the world. Brown was founding editor of msnbc.com in 1996.
Although the deal will bolster one of his main competitors, Brown called it “a visionary thing to do.”
“It’s a really good thing for citizen content and the news category in general, because it demonstrates [that] the citizen content opportunity and the growth of community in a big way around news content is not a niche,” he said.
