Last November, MSNBC acquired the Twitter account @breakingnews, which was started as a basic newswire by Michael van Poppel and gradually grew to 1.4 million followers (it’s now up to over 1.6 million). A month later, MSNBC announced that it had acquired BreakingNews.com, which has become a web portal for the online newswire. And today, it’s managed to complete the trifecta: MSNBC has just launched a Facebook Page at Facebook.com/BreakingNews.
MSNBC spokesperson Gina Stikes says that the new Facebook account will only send updates for the biggest stories to break (you can still use its other feeds if you want to receive every story to come from the service). The page is obviously still quite new (it only has 645 fans right now), but you can expect that the grow quickly.
Just how quickly is the big question, though: we’ll have to wait to see if MSNBC will be able to leverage its large community on Twitter to establish its Facebook page. In any case, it’s managed to take ownership of the term “breaking news” across a large swath of the web, which is no small feat.
The more news the better! For a news junkie that is. I have always preferred the hard news streams over voting sites like Digg …
Yeah, but this is from a network that barely offers live “breaking” news on its news cable channel. They continually run reruns of prison documentaries because their audience is so low they cannot afford news programming. So basically the NBC news brand has been reduced to a generic “breaking news” Twitter and Facebook feed. Pretty sad. I wonder if they will have Brian Williams sending out the tweets from the anchor desk? Ha ha.
you forgot to mention that MSNBC is the top news site on the internet.
They probably forgot to mention it because it’s not true. CNN.com is #1
I think the stream is great… but on Twitter where I don’t have to read other people’s thoughts.
Seriously, the latest comment is some idiot saying “Good” in response to “Federal appeals court in San Francisco rejects athiest’s argument that the phrase ‘under God’ in the Pledge of Allegiance is unconstitutional”.
And 4 other idiots “like” it too.
I’ll stick to Twitter where I don’t need to see that rubbish. Unless Facebook makes a “dislike” button.
It does not matter where MSNBC is- not worth watching in the first place.
Which source would you recommend instead?
I run a similar service out of my kitchen. 55 fans and growing!
http://www.facebook.com/pages/MostMost/87942483879
Best,
David
Any idea on how much they paid for each?
If they paid more than $50k for each, they got ripped off.
This would be a great thing but…MSNBC is the closest we have right now to a state-run media and, before that, a Democrat-controlled media outlet.
Even Fox News, during the Bush years, criticized Bush every once in a while. You can’t say the same for MSNBC concerning Democrats…
Probably pay 25k for each name! I wonder if online site like facebook will benefits news Chanel. People are too busy chatting with each other no time for news.
Great to see MSNBC taking significant strides.
this is really great news
we’ll have to wait to see if MSNBC will be able to leverage its large community on Twitter to establish its Facebook page.
MSNBC should spend less time on social media toys and more time actually working on its website, which IMHO is starting to get a bit stale.