The hunger for social media in its many forms and the desire to mash that up with professional media shows no sign of stopping.
The Huffington Post story was slightly different. That blog and news site attracted Betsy Morgan, a senior executive at CBS, to be its first chief executive. It was not only a big hire for the site, but it was someone from mainstream media.
Newsvine was launched last year and backed by a venture capital company. Incidentally the same VC firm, Second Avenue Partners, that also backed another social media newsite FanNation.com, which was acquired by Sports Illustrated in February.
Newsvine, founded by Mike Davidson in March 2006 and snapped up like many social news media (such as Del.icio.us, now owned by Yahoo!, and StumbleUpon.com, owned by eBay), carries news from a variety of sources that is voted on and discussed by its community.
Davidson says that the site's mission, which has also famously broken news (beating AP to the Virginia Tech massacre by 22 minutes), has never been to displace mainstream media but to "create a social ecosystem around the news".
"Our vision has always been to create an environment where mainstream media and independent media live together and frankly make each other better," Davidson said.
Currently the site is getting around a million unique users a month.
But while Newsvine might not be replacing mainstream media, the professionals want some of what social media has.
MSNBC, an 11-year-old joint venture between NBC Universal and Microsoft, wants to incorporate some of Newsvine's features into MSNBC.com. Namely that is community, but it is working out how to do it.
It will be interesting how these marriages make out. How the amateur social media news men sit alongside the journalism school graduate professionals.
While community is the key and user-generated content one of the great social media freebies, it could also drag the real product down if it is not done right, but if it is done right, and the professional is merged with the amateur, the results could very powerful.
Time will tell, but one thing that is clear immediately is that what is news is no longer exactly what the BBC or The Times or anyone else says it is, with powerful communities like these creating their own news as users rate and promote stories.
Charlie Tillinghast, president of MSNBC and publisher of MSNBC.com told the New York Times that stories filed by Newsvine users would have to be verified before appearing on MSNBC.com.
"But we would never say, 'We're not going to put that up because it came through Newsvine.' In fact, just the opposite. We see Newsvine as an excellent source of stories for MSNBC.com." a chief executive from mainstream media.
Gordon Macmillan
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