msnbc.com

Breaking news service BNO News, primarily known for its @BreakingNews Twitter account that has more than 1.4 million followers, has announced it will launch a paid-subscription newswire in early January.

Called BNO News Wire, the international service will target news media organizations as subscribers. BNO News also announced the first client of its newswire: Msnbc.com.

There's an interesting wrinkle to the deal, paidContent.org's Rafat Ali reports:

MSNBC.com [also] will take over the management of the @BreakingNews Twitter feed starting next month, while BNO and its 20-year old Dutch founder Michael van Poppel will now focus on developing its subscription-based wire service to sell to news companies.

Here's how BNO News described the arrangement in a press release:

MSNBC.com has agreed to manage @BreakingNews starting in early December and will continue to provide a 24/7 up-to-the-second feed of breaking news headlines via the Twitter account. This collaboration adds BNO News' wire service to msnbc.com's already robust news-gathering operation and means followers of @BreakingNews will continue to receive the timely news and updates they expect. BNO News' service will be a key input for the Twitter feed, which will incorporate breaking news from many media sources, original reporting on developing situations and links to more information across the Web.

With only 41,500 followers of its @msnbc_breaking Twitter account, being handed the keys to @BreakingNews is a potentially big benefit for msnbc.com. For BNO News, surrendering day-to-day responsibility for its @breakingnews Twitter account frees up van Poppel and others to focus on developing another revenue-generating service. The company already charges for its iPhone apps and monthly subscription.

msnbc.com and Onvia teamed up to create The Stimulus Tracker, which, as its name implies, tracks American Recovery and Reinvestment Act spending data in real-time based on geography, state, county and city.

The Stimulus Tracker includes an interactive map, an analysis of ARRA spending progression and specific details for top projects by cost, geography and spending category. The data link back to Onvia's Recovery.org for more detailed information.

msnbc.com studio-development-team manager Jim Ray said:

msnbc.com's stimulus tracker lets consumers track billions of dollars of recovery-act contracts with a visually rich map at the national, state and county level. We'll continue to expand on our data to include the recently released data from the federal government, as well as new layers of relevant data over the coming weeks and months, until all of the recovery-act money has been spent.

And Onvia CEO Mike Pickett added:

This partnership with msnbc.com is an incredible opportunity to provide a meaningful context to our recovery project data. One goal of this partnership is to make stimulus-spending information available to everyone, especially the businesses that will benefit from this growing market.

The MSNBC Headlines Twitter account is now suspended following a particularly volatile Friday of tweets, but MSNBC told TechCrunch the account never belonged to it, and the account had been tweeting MSNBC headlines before veering in a slightly different direction Friday.

Among the offending tweets, as posted by TechCrunch (not safe for work):

Barack Obama is a stupid fucking socialist.

ALL CARTOONS ARE FUCKIN' DICKS! @DylanMSNBC, @Maddow, @MADNews101 are all cartoons!

WOW! Chris Matthews SUCKS! A douchebag like him is probably getting a blow job from another pussy liberal like @MADNews101!

Keith Olbermann…Tonight's WORST PERSON IN THE WORLD! Bill O'Reilly Kicks Ass!!!!!!

We LOVE Sean Hannity!! Cum all over us Glenn Beck!!

Shut the fuck up @ImusShow. You nappy-headed ho. Your wife's a cunt by the way.

@briandevine FUCK YOU.

msnbc.com is resizing its video player to make it compatible with Facebook, and the Website will introduce a scheme to arrange thumbnail images of in-stream advertisement around the player, president and publisher Charles Tillinghast told Beet.TV executive producer Andy Plesser.

Tillinghast said the ads appear for a short time, and then get moved to a thumbnail gallery around the player, allowing users to find them without having to watch the video again.

NBC News and msnbc.com want to bring viewers to the Tip of the Spear in Afghanistan's deadly Korengal Valley.

Tip of the Spear offers the Emmy Award-winning special reports by NBC News chief foreign correspondent Richard Engel and his team, who followed the soldiers of Viper Company through the most dangerous region of Afghanistan, witnessing the death of a soldier felled by friendly fire and giving viewers a detailed look at life inside a war zone.

The new site offers all Tip of the Spear reports, as well as exclusive Web-only video and analysis by Engel. It also links to NBC News' blog from Kabul and the latest headlines from South and Central Asia.

Call it confrontational, call it rude, call it an act of journalism, but MSNBC's Dylan Ratigan was all over U.S. Chamber of Commerce CEO Tom Donahue on Wednesday morning's show, at one point accusing him of talking "nonsense."

Donahue was on the program to hype the Chamber's "American Free Enterprise" campaign, which he says would create 20 million new jobs over the next decade.

But as HuffPost's Arthur Delaney writes, "Ratigan seemed to be more interested in taking Donohue to the woodshed."

Festivities below:

If only the powers that be at msnbc.com understood that Adolph Hitler actually was a man of peace, they wouldn't have acted so rashly in removing their site's link to a Pat Buchanan column essentially blaming England for World War II.

But like the appeasers they are, they crumbled under the slightest pressure, in this case the understandable outrage of the National Jewish Democratic Council, whose president David Harris, condemned the right-wing commentator's piece on Thursday as "deplorable" historical revisionism.

Buchanan's latest column should be removed immediately from MSNBC.com, and no worthy news organization should employ a commentator who engages in such vile fiction.

The link to the column appears to have been removed by msnbc.com late Thursday night. Politico's Michael Calderone has more:

Harris, in a second statement, said that "MSNBC took the responsible action and removed Pat Buchanan's column," while adding that "no worthy news organization should employ and promote a commentator who engages in such vile fiction."

An MSNBC spokesperson issued a statement to POLITICO: "An editorial decision was made to remove the column from msnbc.com. Pat is a contributor to MSNBC, his syndicated column does not speak for the network or represent the views of MSNBC."

Well, that's comforting. By the way, if you want to read Buchanan's column ("Did Hitler Want War?"), written to commemorate the 70th anniversary of Germany's invasion of Poland, it's here (screen shot below). Be ready, though: It truly is a litany of lunacy.

Vowing to separate fact from fiction in the acrimonious debate over health care reform, msnbc.com today launched an online guide to healthcare reform.

Called "Dose of Reality," the guide offers news, video, analysis, community forums and interactive tools on health care.

"Health care reform has the potential to touch the lives of every single American," msnbc.com Health Editor Julia Sommerfeld said in a prepared statement. "Our readers don't want to just sit back and read the headlines on this most personal of politics stories. They want to join the discussion, frame the debate and have their specific issues addressed."

Indeed, msnbc.com is counting on this impulse to drive coverage. The most prominent feature on the guide's site is "Your Daily Dose," in which readers are asked to submit health care claims they'd like investigated to msnbc.com politics reporter Tom Curry, who will post his findings.

For readers who can't wait for Curry to look into your question, the site features a section near the bottom of the home page called "Tools and explainers" (sample headline: 5 biggest myths of health care reform).

And if you tire of "facts" and "reality," there's always the Twitter argue-fest immediately above.

msnbc.com announced Monday that it acquired Chicago-based Website EveryBlock, which provides news and information "down to the neighborhood level" in 15 cities. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

msnbc.com said EveryBlock will continue as an independent brand, adding that the sites allow users to enter their addresses, neighborhood names or ZIP codes to view local news coverage, blog entries, civic data, photos and other types of information, updated continuously.

Along with its hometown of Chicago, EveryBlock also runs sites focused on Atlanta; Boston; Charlotte, N.C.; Dallas; Detroit; Houston; Los Angeles; Miami; New York; Philadelphia; San Francisco; San Jose, Calif.; Seattle; and Washington, D.C.

msnbc.com president Charlie Tillinghast said:

EveryBlock's talented team has a track record of innovation in the industry, and we're excited to add them to the msnbc.com brand family. They've broken new ground with their unique approach to collecting, organizing and presenting news down to the block level. Their impact and importance in the community space is extremely valuable and carries promise for journalism and new business models.

EveryBlock founder Adrian Holovaty, who said the company's staff of five will continue to be based in Chicago, added:

Joining with msnbc.com gives us the resources to turn EveryBlock from a cool, useful service into something much bigger.

MSNBC.com is finding more and more viewing of its shared videos off-site, at locations such as The Huffington Post, so president and publisher Charles Tillinghast told Beet.TV managing editor Andy Plesser the company will use Redwood City, Calif.-based video-ad network YuMe to insert advertising into its embeddable player and monetize the increased off-site consumption.