News company MSNBC (which is owned by Microsoft and NBC Universal) has bought Newsvine, its first acquisition after 11 years in business. According to MSNBC's own reporter, Newsvine is "a small but innovative player in what is known as 'participatory journalism'."
Rex Sorgatz, Executive Producer of MSNBC.com, writing on his personal blog, says:
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.
Newsvine is rather small -- half a dozen people -- so I reckon it will need to keep its distance to avoid being crushed.
Read/Write Web has some good coverage of Newsvine, including reviews.
