Msnbc.com announced the first acquisition in its 11-year history on Sunday, and is buying Seattle-based citizen journalism site Newsvine.com in an all-cash deal whose terms were not disclosed.
Newsvine CEO Mike Davidson will report to Charlie Tillinghast, president of MSNBC Interactive News and publisher of msnbc.com, also headquartered in Seattle. Newsvine will remain an
independent entity, according to Tillinghast.
In the hierarchy of social news sites, Newsvine is tiny--with just more than a million monthly users, according to msnbc.com, which attracts more
than 29 million monthly users. Founded in March 2006, it combines traditional reporting from mainstream media sources with individual paid contributions and user-driven rankings, a la Digg.com and
others.
"Msnbc isn't as strong in community as it needs to be," Tillinghast said, adding that it will eventually bring Newsvine's most interesting features and technology to the parent site.
"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.
The deal gives the startup Newsvine a chance to piggyback on msnbc.com's servers to better manage large spikes of traffic.
Msnbc.com is following in the trail of
Yahoo, which bought Del.icio.us; and eBay's purchase of StumbleUpon.com. Others in the space include Reddit, which is owned by Wired.com.
The purchase "begins what I believe is the revolution
that big sites like msnbc need to go through," said Merrill Brown, who served as founding editor of msnbc.com in 1996 and is now chairman of the citizen journalism site NowPublic.com.
"It's a
really good thing for citizen content and the news category in general, because it demonstrates ... the citizen content opportunity and the growth of community in a big way around news content is not
a niche," he said. NowPublic.com has 100,000 contributing reporters worldwide.