MSNBC joins Web 2.0 world with citizen journalism site

Computerworld - MSNBC Interactive News LLC staked a claim to the Web 2.0 world Sunday with its acquisition of Seattle-based Newsvine Inc., a site that focuses on citizen journalism.

Newsvine, which MSNBC said will remain an independent brand, includes contributor columns, user profiles, group commenting and conversation tracking aimed at bringing multiple perspectives to news stories. The acquisition is the first for MSNBC in its 11-year history.

Financial terms were not disclosed.

Charlie Tillinghast, president of MSNBC.com, said in a statement that the acquisition will allow MSNBC to expand social media and community features across all of the company's brands.

Mike Davidson, CEO and co-founder of Newsvine, noted that the deal will allow more people to contribute to the site and helps "further the cause" of citizen journalism.

"We founded the company with the notion that big and little media can interact in a way which respects established journalism and empowers the individual at the same time," Davidson said in a statement. "In MSNBC.com, we see a world-class news organization who complements that vision."

Dan Gillmor, director for the Center for Citizen Media, noted in a blog post that the deal was significant for the world of citizen journalism.

"Now we need to see the experiment taken to a more logical conclusion, because Newsvine and its competitors are getting only part of this right -- and a company with deep pockets could take it further," Gillmor wrote.

"Along with Digg, Reddit and others, Newsvine is one of the sites that has led the way in the voting-on-news arena," he said. "But popularity is an extremely crude tool when it comes to understanding quality, better than nothing, but not much better. They and the host of competitors out there need to add reputation to the mix. Whoever gets this right will win, big, and so will the rest of us as we move toward seriously useful community vetting of news and information. We're not even close yet."

Richard MacManus, founder and editor of the technology blog Read/WriteWeb, noted in a blog post that Newsvine is "probably the most advanced in its design" that other citizen journalism sites.

"In our July review of Newsvine, we noted that Newsvine gets about 1.2 million unique visitors per month, and it has grown at an average rate of 46% per quarter," MacManus wrote. "Newsvine community members view an average of 21 pages per day and spend an average of 143 minutes per month on the site. The site gets about 80,000 comments a month and 250,000 votes a month."

Read more about web 2.0 in Computerworld's Web 2.0 Knowledge Center.