MSNBC.com Becomes NBCNEWS.com Today

NBC News has acquired full control of msnbc.com and its digital network from Microsoft Corp. and is immediately rebranding the site as NBCNews.com. NBC News President Steve Capus said the site — one of the news industry's earliest and most successful online operations — would become part of NBC News Digital, a new division led by Vivian Schiller, the former president and chief executive of National Public Radio. Schiller joined NBC News as chief digital officer last year.

"Some really talented journalists have passed through the doorway of msnbc.com and taken us to the point where we have something that is an outstanding set of properties, and we value them to such a degree that we decided that we wanted to own them outright," she said.

In the short term, msnbc.com will reflect the homepage of NBCNews.com. Eventually, it will become the address of MSNBC TV, giving MSNBC TV its own dedicated address and ending an arrangement under which the news site shared the MSNBC name with an increasingly commentary-driven channel.

Charlie Tillinghast, the site's president and publisher, said NBC News would benefit from "proper brand alignment between the TV properties and their Web counterparts — NBC News and NBCNews.com, MSNBC cable and msnbc.com and TODAY show and TODAY.com."

"We've had great success combining TV, desktop, mobile and iTV (Internet TV) where the value is greater than the sum of the parts," he said. "That requires both the brand alignment and product integration that is possible only with a wholly owned unit."

For now, visitors should see little difference. "It'll have a new name and a new URL, but everything else will be the same," Tillinghast said.

Capus said that even though the name would change, the site's focus on hard news and original reporting would stay the same. The site has won the highest awards in online journalism, including last year's National Headliner Award for best television-affiliated website.

"There's nothing wrong with what's there," he said. "There's nothing that needs to be fixed."

Instead, the new arrangement "plays to our strengths," he said.

"NBC News has the most diverse portfolio of offerings of any news organization in the country, period," Capus said. "We were in a joint venture in the area with the biggest growth in the news and information space, and we would like to control our own future."

The deal ends 16 years of a 50-50 joint venture between Microsoft and NBCUniversal, which is now majority-owned by Comcast Corp. The arrangement married NBC News' exclusive news and video content with Microsoft's technological expertise.

The ties are deep, and untangling them will take at least two years, the network said.

During that time — and perhaps beyond — NBCNews.com will continue to provide news for MSN.com, Microsoft's Web portal, which will contribute traffic back to the network, said Meghan Pianta, a spokeswoman for NBC News.

Microsoft also will continue to sell NBCNews.com's advertising inventory for an undisclosed period, which Capus said should minimize disruption in ad revenue.

For NBC News, the advantages are clear, industry analysts and company executives said. It will control its own digital future through a digital network that was visited by 49.9 million people in June, according to figures from the online analytics company comScore.

In addition, while msnbc.com has never publicly reported revenue figures, independent industry studies have called it the most profitable news website in the United States. NBCUniversal will now collect those profits.

For Microsoft, moving on "allows us to go out and innovate," said Bob Visse, general manager of MSN.com.

Under the joint venture, NBC News was the exclusive news provider for MSN.com, which now will be able to negotiate partnerships with other news organizations in order to appeal to the widest possible audience.

MSN.com has begun hiring for a new news operation — as yet unnamed — that will launch in the fall, he said.

"If you start thinking about what we're going to be doing in Windows 8 and the Bing app and what we're going to be doing ... across the multiple platforms, it makes a lot of sense for Microsoft," Visse said.

"We're talking about using technology and using data to solve information delivery and news delivery in new and innovative ways," he said. "It's really difficult for us to do that when we have an exclusive, single-source relationship with one news provider."

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