Tech Crunch is headlining some breaking news that’s interesting: apparently MSNBC has scooped up the news aggregator and wisdom-of-the-crowd site Newsvine.
According to the report:
Newsvine founder Mike Davidson said that the companies will continue operating separately but that technology integration will occur over time.
The combination of MSNBC, which is a fairly aggressive online news organization, and the lively community (and community-building features) of Newsvine could be potent, if MSNBC can figure out how to bring the two together, without cutting into the individual sites’ strengths.
It’ll be interesting to watch.
Update: There’s a little more on this from Rex Sorgatz. In his post Why we bought Newsvine, he writes:
You can read elsewhere about the details of the deal, but the gist is this: we plan to leave Newsvine alone — learn from it, integrate little pieces of it, watch it grow. The site will continue to run independently with Mike at the helm; meanwhile, we will incrementally find sensible ways to integrate the “social thinking” of Newsvine into the “big media thinking” of MSNBC.com.
I’m convinced that Newsvine represents a different way of thinking about traditional media — as merger of gathering, interacting, and consuming. By positing news as an ecosystem rather than a hierarchy, the philosophy of Newsvine is actually an old one. News has always been conversational, but only recently have we begun to rediscover the tools to bring it back to its networked mode. Mike and his team have built an amazing site, and we are excited to turn some of our large audience onto it.
Note the “we will incrementally find sensible ways to integrate the ‘social thinking’ of Newsvine into the ‘big media thinking’ of MSNBC.com.”
TAGS: JOURNALISM, ONLINE MEDIA, NEWSVINE, MSNBC
