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MSNBC has turned to a young Dutchman to provide the cable network with a Twitter news feed.
From Forbes.com
After months of plotting strategy to move into social media, MSNBC.com found the right man to help: 20-year-old Michael van Poppel, a Dutch media maven with a newsfeed on Twitter.
Michael van Who? The choice isn’t as odd as it seems. Three years ago, from an apartment in Tilburg, the Netherlands, Van Poppel launched a Twitter feed called “BreakingNews.” Trawling the Web for arcane but reliable news sources, he aggregated them onto his feed, linking to breaking headlines in Europe and around the world.
Twitter was but a year old and Van Poppel just 17 at the time, but the novel idea drew an overnight following. BreakingNews’ first major scoop, to the astonishment of the European news establishment, was Van Poppel’s acquisition of a videotape carrying a statement from Osama bin Laden. How did a Dutch teen with a Twitter feed get hold of a Bin Laden tape? “It came to me from a source within the U.S. government,” is all Van Poppel will say.
After selling the video to Reuters, Van Poppel was deluged by social media fans in other countries eager to lend a hand tweeting news. This crowdsourcing soon paid off. In early 2008, when a small earthquake rocked the U.K. town of Grimsby, Van Poppel’s minions in the English countryside were jolted into action, pinging instant accounts. Those tweets triggered pre-set keywords on Van Poppel’s Twitter pages, which alerted him via instant messaging service GoogleTalk. Van Poppel, in turn, began posting quake bulletins, tweeting its estimated magnitude before the BBC even reported it.
By August of last year, Van Poppel had amassed 1.5 million followers–and the interest of MSNBC.
“We bumped into his Twitter account and found that he was finding news faster than a lot of traditional sources,” says Charlie Tillinghast, president of MSNBC.com Digital Network. Tillinghast’s staff sent an IM written in Dutch to the 20-year-old news mogul, asking whether he’d be interested in a deal whereby MSNBC’s digital division would manage the feed under MSNBC’s moniker. The network also contacted Twitter to get its blessing, says Tillinghast (Twitter doesn’t allow its account domains to be sold, only managed, by users). A meeting was arranged in September at MSNBC’s Rockefeller Center offices. The visit was slightly surreal for Van Poppel, whose hometown in the Dutch Province of Noord-Brabant is best known for its university and a gel capsule manufacturing plant.
In a package deal, MSNBC.com acquired the rights to manage Van Poppel’s Twitter feed indefinitely and is paying him undisclosed fees to carry a separate headline service Van Poppel has launched, BNO News, for three years. Tillinghast now dedicates a full-time staff of three to the BreakingNews feed, aided by MSNBC.com reporters and editors in New York and Redmond, Wash.
This new newsfeed in hand, Tillinghast acquired a sister url, BreakingNews.com, to bring it to the Web. The sister site is the 10th domain in MSNBC’s digital network and mimics Van Poppel’s feed by listing Twitter-driven links to stories. “Our analysis of the market is that there’s plenty of news recirculated around the Web, but not a lot of hard, original breaking news,” says Tillinghast.
Executives at MSNBC’s rival, CNN, apparently feel the same way. Last summer they staked out a Twitter page called “Cnnbrk,” short for “CNN Breaking News.” But CNN is moving its pithy headlines in the other direction–from its news Web site to Twitter.
Does it matter which way the headlines fly? Tillinghast can’t say; he’s too busy working on a third foray into social media. Earlier this month MSNBC.com struck a deal to run the BreakingNews feed on Facebook. By the end of February it will carry BreakingNews’ unvarnished headlines. Therein lies its appeal, says Tillinghast. “Not everyone wants news surrounded by takes, commentary or features.”
Twitter has become a major source of news and for many people their only source and deals like this will only make it more difficult for newspapers to compete and survive going forward. Watch for other networks to emulate what MSNBC has done to attract viewers and readers away from traditional news sources further hastening their decline.
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About the author
Don Irvine is Chairman of Accuracy in Media. He is active on Facebook and Twitter. You can follow him @donirvine to read his latest thoughts.
2 Comments for MSNBC Goes Dutch on Twitter
OK. So teens are now going to read less and expect every news story to only contain 140 characters.
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Instead of focusing on twitter, I wish MSNBC would invest in some real news coverage, especially during the weekend. I’m tired of having to surf past the awful “Locked Up” episodes because the network can’t afford live news programming.
Sack the day time “anchors,” Olbermann, Maddow and Matthews and hire a few professional anchors instead of continuing to pay commentators who don’t believe in doing any research or reporting facts.
Incredible. I wonder if we’ll even have newscasters in the future. Isn’t it funny that the editor of time that made “You” (i.e. us as a society) the time man of the year, got sacked?!