MSNBC And NowThis News Team Up For New Series, “15 Seconds To Truth”

Get ready for 15-second news segments on MSNBC.

Following an announcement in January that NBCUniversal News Group had made a strategic investment in mobile news startup NowThis News, the companies are announcing their first collaboration on regular programming, with a show called “15 Seconds to Truth.” As you can probably guess, each segment will be 15 seconds long (a format that NowThis News pretty much pioneered), and they’ll each focus on one of the main news stories of the day.

NBCUniversal News Group says the segments will air on MSNBC during the transition into and out of commercial breaks, and they’ll also be posted on Facebook and Twitter. In terms of actually creating the videos, it sounds like NowThis News will be taking the lead, but NBCUniversal News Group says it’s involved, too. The companies worked together to develop the idea, and the news group has team members working out of the NowThis News office every day.

“By bringing content custom made for Twitter and Facebook to television, and not the other way around, MSNBC is embracing the possibilities of cross-platform news delivery in innovative new ways,” said NowThis News President Sean Mills in the show’s press release.

The startup focuses on short news segments and says it produces 50 of them a day from studios in New York and Washington, D.C. It was founded by Kenneth Lerer (Huffington Post co-founder and manager at Lerer Ventures) and former Huffington Post CEO Eric Hippeau.

The first “15 Seconds To Truth” segment is scheduled to go live at 2pm Eastern today. I’ll update this post with a link once it’s available.

Update: Here’s the first video, focusing on protests by Italian youth.