> Did anyone else see it? Was I hallucinating? (Oh please, say I was,
> say it isn't so...)
>
> A promotion, on NBC news, cutsey icon and everything...
>
> Has Bill Gates really "joined" NBC as a "sponsor" of the NBC news?
Let's just say the MS in MSNBC doesn't stand for "Mighty Swell".
In a nutshell: NBC is killing off the excreble America's Talking network
(it's already dead, in fact, last live AT broadcast was on Friday). In
its place, on or around July 15, will come MSNBC, an all-news channel
meant to compete with CNN. Microsoft and NBC are pooling their money to
finance it.
The good news: NBC demanded, and got, full control over the journalism.
Microsoft is donating only cash, some online service experience, and half
the name.
The bad news: None of the announced plans so far make MSNBC sound like
they're planning any Way New Journalism. In fact, it all sounds Way
Stale; lots of the same old same old. They're even planning a nightly
hour-long computer show, half-produced by Ziff-Davis (ewww), coming out
of...wait for it....a loft in San Francisco! Can they possibly be any
more C|Net than C|Net? Oh, and a sample of the kind of story they intend
to cover, repeated by their own PR people at least five times so far: How
To Protect Your Kids On the Internet. Kind of says it all, no?
Anyway, if anyone's interested in keeping up with MSNBC developments,
we're monitoring it closely over on the World News Now list (WNN through
LISTSERV@HOME.EASE.LSOFT.COM). Feel free to dial up our archives and run
a search on "MSNBC":
http://home.ease.lsoft.com/archives/wnn.html
--Aaron