Newsvine

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

~ the goodbye ~

the first time i heard the name newsvine was probably in a techcrunch acquisition headline in october 2007. it was a us news-commentary site that nbc bought to plug a hole in their digital strategy, and it spent ten more years quietly inside the msnbc-then-nbcnews stack before being turned off without ceremony in october 2017.

mike davidson and three cofounders launched the public site on march 1, 2006 out of a small office near downtown seattle. the pitch was a kind of reddit-meets-nyt: a news front page where any user could 'seed' a link or write a column, with editorial decisions made by community votes rather than a top editor. time magazine named it top news site of 2006. msnbc.com bought the company in october 2007 and ran the brand as a community comments-and-columns layer attached to msnbc.com proper.

the platform's slow decline started after the 2014 nbcnews.com redesign, which moved newsvine from a peer site under the msnbc umbrella to a back-page resource under the new nbc news brand. the writer community thinned as a result. by 2017 most of the regular contributors had drifted to medium or to their own blogs, and msnbc and nbc had spent two years figuring out which products to consolidate. on october 1, 2017 the redirect went live and every newsvine url now pointed at nbcnews.com. nobody from nbc made a public announcement, and most of the regular column-writers found out from a tumblr-style obit that mike davidson posted on his personal blog the next day.

~ the chronicle ~

~ how it landed ~

the actual newsvine product was a clever bit of crowd-curation. the front page sorted user-seeded links by recent vote velocity, and registered users earned reputation that affected vote weight. that mechanism is the same one reddit later scaled into a global product, and digg ran on a less sophisticated version of it during the same period. newsvine's distinguishing feature was that it lived next to actual ap wire articles. when you wrote a column on newsvine in 2006 you could end up linked from a genuine breaking-news page, which was an unusual amount of reach for an unsalaried writer.

~ what it became ~

the msnbc.com acquisition was supposed to give nbc a comments-and-community engine for the rest of the digital news property, and for a few years it actually worked. by 2010 newsvine threads were the comment system on most msnbc article pages, and the platform had quietly become one of the highest-volume political-comment communities on the us cable-news web. that situation lasted until nbc news rebranded away from msnbc digital in 2014, after which the comment integration was rolled back and the standalone newsvine site was demoted to a side project.

~ the day it died ~

on october 1, 2017 the newsvine redirect went live and the previous decade's worth of community columns rolled up into a single forwarder url. nbc had not given the writer community advance notice. mike davidson, who had stepped away from the company years earlier, wrote a public obit on his personal blog the next day. that obit is now the closest thing to a record of what was on the site, since most of the original urls were not preserved. the only sense in which newsvine was 'replaced' is that nbc's existing comment system handled the load. the writers were not.

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