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NBCNews.com was a website launched in July 2012 after Microsoft and NBCUniversal dissolved the jointly owned and operated MSNBC.com.
The site contained MSNBC TV content until MSNBC relaunched its own MSNBC.com site in 2013. NBC relaunched NBCNews.com in 2014 with an emphasis on original digital video.
Previously, msnbc.com was corporately separate from the cable channel MSNBC, though it was launched along with MSNBC in 1996. While the cable channel has been owned by NBCUniversal since 2005, msnbc.com remained a 50/50 partnership between NBC and Microsoft. In mid-2012, NBC was reported to be buying Microsoft’s half of msnbc.com, with the site being rebranded as NBCNews.com.
Msnbc.com was the third-largest news site on the web by unique visitors as of April 2011. It had long been recognized as one of the web’s most innovative news sites, winning numerous online journalism awards. During the early 2000s, the site found success even as the cable channel struggled. It turned a profit for the first time in 2004.
During that time, the site experimented with a comprehensive classified section and a personalized news aggregator and was one of the web’s largest news video providers.
In the latter part of the decade, msnbc.com made several acquisitions of web-based news startups. In 2007, it bought the Seattle-based Newsvine, a social news website.
From 2009 to 2013, msnbc.com and NBCNews owned EveryBlock, a site that collected and sorted local news data in more than a dozen U.S. cities. Msnbc.com bought EveryBlock in 2009, and NBC shut it down in 2013. After its acquisition, EveryBlock added local discussion boards, a partnership with the community fix-it site SeeClickFix, and a mobile version. It underwent a major redesign in 2011 to emphasize community conversation alongside local data.
Later in 2009, msnbc.com also took over management of the @BreakingNews Twitter feed, which had 1.4 million followers at the time. In January 2010, the site bought breakingnews.com, announcing plans for a “multi-platform, integrated effort” involving the new site and Twitter feed. Since the acquisitions, a team within msnbc.com has been developing the site’s breaking news strategy, experimenting in particular with crowdsourced curation. In 2012, BreakingNews released an app that produced breaking news tickers on TV screens.
The Daily was a tablet- and mobile-based, general-interest daily news publication owned by News Corp. The Daily was launched in February 2011 as the first tablet-specific publication of its kind and was scheduled to cease publishing in December 2012, with its technology and some staff folded into the New York Post. News Corp. initially invested $30…
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