MSNBC bought Newsvine for an undisclosed sum in October 2007, the first acquisition in its eleven-year history. Newsvine carried on as a separate site while MSNBC looked at ways of folding its social and community features into its own operation. PaidContent put the price at between $5m and $7m in an all-cash deal, closed on the Friday after a bidding process involving several companies.
Newsvine’s chief executive, Mike Davidson, explained the sale on his personal blog in terms of reach: “Our goal at Newsvine has always been to spread the ethos of participatory news as far and wide as possible, and what more dramatic way can that be accomplished than with a partner who reaches 85 million computers a month and has an offline presence on nearly every television set in the country?”
Rex Sorgatz, executive producer of MSNBC.com, framed the purchase as a bet on a structure rather than a product, calling Newsvine “a different way of thinking about traditional media — as merger of gathering, interacting, and consuming” and positing news as an ecosystem rather than a hierarchy: “News has always been conversational, but only recently have we begun to rediscover the tools to bring it back to its networked mode.”
The open question at the time was whether the rest of the mainstream would now go shopping for participatory journalism sites of their own.