Correction: An earlier version of this story incorrectly reported that BreakingNews.com was opperated by BNO.
MSNBC announced this morning that it is buying the BreakingNews.com URL. This follows November’s purchase of @breakingnews and its 1.4 million followers.
BreakingNews.com has made waves since it first appeared, often breaking news before its mainstream competitors. When we profiled its 19-year-old founder Michael van Poppel in July, the company was just about to release its iPhone app and had over 800,000 followers on Twitter. That number is now over 1.5 million.
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“Not everyone wants news surrounded by commentary or features,” said Charlie Tillinghast, president of the MSNBC Digital Network in the company’s press release about the purchase.
We can only hope, however, that MSNBC can do the job that BreakingNews.com was doing before. If Twitter followings are an indication of how reliable the public perceives a news source to be, when we looked at the purchase of @breakingnews, MSNBC’s own Twitter account was dwarfed by the alternative news outlet.
MSNBC Spokesperson Gina Stikes told us in an email that “Msnbc has acquired the URL only,” so what will happen with the BreakingNews.com staff remains to be seen. She did not disclose any further details, such as the purchase price.
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