MSNBC.com to Offer User Generated News

MSNBC.com has acquired Newsvine, which is a user generated news site. Newsvine will remain unchanged according to the Seattle Times, but MSNBC.com will probably incorporate features from Newsvine in an effort to add interactivity to its own site.

Newsvine selects submissions to be posted based on "...what's popular, what's important and what people are looking to read," says Mike Davidson, Newsvine co-founder and CEO.

Visitors will be able to view user generated stories and stories from mainstream sources such as AP, New York Times and ESPN. MSNBC.com Publisher and President Charlie Tillinghast noted that user generated content will be appropriately marked as such.

I think it's great that there will be an outlet online through a major source for the common people. It will be interesting to see what kind of stories will get published and if MSNBC.com will show it's usual liberal bias through user generated content. I would think user generated content will either be super bias, or super irrelevant to life - like this recent Newsvine headline.

One of the problems I saw with this site was that Newsvine publishes multiple versions of the same stories. they need to have a better content manager. A good example of an appropriate content manager would be Digg's site, which searches it's own content before you're able to submit new content. It will let you know if anything similar has been posted.