Back in July, when writing about GetGlue’s partnership with HBO, I told CEO Alex Iskold that if they struck a deal to get Mad Men stickers from AMC, I’d be on board. Well, he went out and did just that. So here I am, loading up GetGlue.
And AMC is hardly the only new partner that GetGlue is announcing today. Disney, HGTV, Discovery, and, in what may be a first for news programming, MSNBC is on board as well. Each of these companies will now have special stickers that users can accumulate when they check-in watching any of their shows. → Read More
BanxCorp this morning announced that it has filed a federal antitrust complaint against nine firms, including Dow Jones & Co, Fox News, The New York Times, CNN and MSNBC.
The company alleges (PDF) that the nine companies engage in “unlawful per se horizontal market division, customer allocation, and price fixing agreements” with its competitors in the market for bank rate websites throughout the United States. → Read More
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. → Read More
I think it’s safe to assume their Twitter account has been hacked.
Update: Yep. Now suspended. → Read More
Even though they haven’t really found a big audience yet, hyperlocal news sites are becoming a hot commodity. In June, AOL bought Patch for $7 million, and today MSNBC acquired EveryBlock. EveryBlock was previously funded by a grant from the Knight Foundation, which ended in June. The five employees will now work at MSNBC.
The price was not disclosed, but like the Patch acquisition, it is not an audience acquisition. Rather it is a hyperlocal platform play which MSNBC can now plug into its site and push in a major way. EveryBlock is a hyperlocal news aggregator, bringing in geo-specific feeds from neighborhood blogs, Flickr, Yelp, Craigslist, and elsewhere to give readers a picture of what is going on in their town or neighborhood. → Read More
CBSNews.com is undergoing a major overhaul and redesign of its sites to make them easier to navigate, more visually compelling, faster and more focused on driving users to content.
The new home page features a rotating list of top stories on the left, next to the list of the latest and most important headlines. CBS News programs, as well as the latest videos, photo galleries and blogs, are all highlighted on the page. CBS News also plugs its program sites, including Evening News, Face the Nation, 60 Minutes, 48 Hours, and Sunday Morning, on its homepage. CBS says that the company applied technology from its sister site, CNET.com, to deliver pages from its servers to users’ screens more rapidly. Dan Farber, CNET’s editor-in-chief, oversaw the redesign. → Read More
Obama’s inauguration is right around the corner and everyone (read: everyone but us) with a media connection is trying to capitalize on what’s sure to be an extremely popular event. MSNBC and Screenvision will show the event live and free in 27 theater covering 21 markets. (register here) Plus, 650 Starbucks in three markets will also show the event live and spearhead a volunteer campaign, dubbed “I’m In!” that rewards a person a tall cup of coffee for five hours of pledge community service. So people are really going to watch this shindig, eh? → Read More
Citizen journalism seems all the rage these days, with normal people breaking news to the world with their mobile phones and portable computers. News sites like GroundReport and CNN’s iReport are offering users outlets for their eyewitness stories, and with emerging mobile broadcasting products like Twitter and Qik, we’re only going to see the trend continue to grow. In keeping with the trend, MySpace has partnered with NBC News and MSNBC.com to launch its “Decision ’08 Convention” contest, which will offer two MySpace users the chance to attend and report from either the Republic or Democratic national convention. From the press release: The videos should be less than two minutes long and answer one of the following questions: “Why do you vote?” “Why are you the best person for this job?” “How will you stand out in the crowd and get the scoop no one else can?” The submission period closes on Wednesday, July 16. Judges will narrow the submissions down to five candidates, who will be voted on by the MySpace community. The two contestants with the highest number of votes will be sent to the national conventions, where they’ll serve as reporters representing the MySpace community. The contest is being orchestrated through MySpace’s Impact portal, which offers users a place to learn and get involved with politics, community service, and eco-friendly projects. CrunchBase Information MySpace Information provided by CrunchBase → Read More
Look what you’ve started, Fake Steve Jobs. In a report on the Michael Vick dog fighting case, MSNBC reporter Alex Johnson mistakenly quoted Fake Al Sharpton as the real Al Sharpton. → Read More
