Breaking News

» see breakingnews.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

This started with a teenager in the Netherlands. Michael van Poppel founded BNO News in May 2007 and ran a Twitter account called @BreakingNews, posting wire-speed alerts faster than the organizations that employed hundreds of people to do the same job. It worked because Twitter in 2007 had no competition for that function and because he was obsessive about verification in a format that did not require any. He ran it until the end of 2009, when MSNBC.com acquired the account and the breakingnews.com domain.

NBC turned the account into a product. It got a website and apps on both phone platforms, plus a newsroom of more than twenty editors and developers under Cory Bergman. The pitch was narrow and good: you told it which topics and places you cared about, and it pushed you an alert when something happened, sourced and timestamped, before the television had cut to it. The Twitter following passed nine million. For a stretch in the early 2010s it was the single fastest way to find out that something had happened anywhere in the world.

On Thursday 8 December 2016, Bergman announced on Twitter that the service had three weeks left, and thanked van Poppel for pioneering the account in the first place. Five days later the team posted a note on Medium that opened by calling itself breaking news they had hoped never to report. The site and the apps stopped pushing alerts on 31 December 2016.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ six years of alerts ~

The farewell note is worth reading because of how it counts. "For the last six years, we've been honored to serve you around the clock," it says, dating the product from the NBC relaunch rather than from the Twitter account, and then it asks for two favors. The first was that readers share the article along with the names and email addresses of the staff, because the extremely talented team was now looking for work. The second was that anybody whose company had relied on the service write in and say so.

That second request points at the actual problem. Breaking News had built a paid product on top of the free one, selling its verified alert feed as premium data to companies that needed to know things quickly. Bergman's own summary was that the model did not fit advertising, and that despite a surge of interest in the premium data, the money had run out. NBC News put it more carefully through its digital SVP, Nick Ascheim: experiments eventually need to sustain themselves, and this one had not managed it despite every effort.

Twenty-odd people were doing round-the-clock verification for an audience of nine million that paid nothing, funded by a data subscription business that was interesting but small. Both halves worked. Neither half paid for the other one.

~ what nine million followers bought ~

The alert catalog was built for an American reader, and that is where this sits at a distance from me. Weather emergencies in states I will never visit, legislative votes, local shootings, team trades. I had a Turkish news habit that ran on television and a handful of local sites, and a global one that ran on Twitter directly rather than through anybody's curated push. The product was excellent and it was not aimed at me, which was true of most English-language news apps of that decade.

What it proved has outlasted it. A fast, verified, topic-filtered alert stream is now a feature inside every large news organization's app, and the staffing model that killed Breaking News is the reason: the work is expensive and the alert itself cannot be sold. NBC still owns the domain, and breakingnews.com has redirected to nbcnews.com for years now, which is where the alerts went.

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