Notes

Putting Some News INSIDE OUR News Feeds
Picking up some news as an afterthought remains a familiar practice even in the digital age, be it grabbing a New York Times with your Starbucks or a USA Today while waiting to board an airplane.

For a company with deep pockets, CNN may become the next great news impulse buy.

Rupert Murdoch has made a bold, $75 billion bid for Time Warner. While the purchase is definately not a certainty, one of the many possible unwanted effects of such a deal would be CNN going up on the market, to avoid antitrust problems because of conflicts with Fox News. CNN's sale, if it just happened, could fetch an estimated $6 billion to $8 billion, an unnamed person acquainted with the matter told Bloomberg. (1)

Speculation abounds regarding recognise the business would want to pick up CNN, should the cable network become available. Popular guesses include CBS, Disney and Yahoo. Google, while not as likely, in addition has been mentioned as a contender; Porter Bibb, managing partner at Mediatech Capital Partners, remarked that the network is actually a perfect complement to Google-owned YouTube. (2)

This speculation got me thinking: What about Facebook?

Facebook announced earlier this season that it could acquire WhatsApp for $19 billion. That price was around three times the estimated value of CNN, for a company that had, at most, $300 million in revenues at the time the offer was announced. I have no opinion concerning the WhatsApp deal, mostly because I have minimal idea what WhatsApp does. (Within my age, this ignorance is permitted, though not encouraged. read more to Google I am aware, vaguely, that WhatsApp lets users send messages and share information, that i thought I had been doing.) I know, however, that CNN has real viewers and makes real, though not vast, profits.

I spend a big portion of each day gathering information. I troll a range of news sites to discover more regarding things that are essential to me. I also check Facebook to find out about people who are vital that you me. Because those people often share and comment upon news items, and because I sometimes react to the items they share, Facebook undoubtedly already has some idea which topics are important to me. If Facebook wished to save me the trouble of scanning six news sites a day, I'd be pleased to tell them more.

It has long been confirmed that Facebook really wants to know whenever you can in what its users do on multilple web sites. Not to mention Facebook really wants to maximize the number of time its users spend on Facebook itself. Why wouldn't Facebook need to get into the business of providing me with news that I, subsequently, might tell my friends? It could mean my friends and I'd all save money time on the social networking, which is exactly what Facebook and its own advertisers ultimately want.

Facebook also has a history of acquisitions, not absolutely all of which were intuitive from the outside. In an inferior deal than its WhatsApp purchase, the company acquired virtual reality start-up Oculus VR earlier this season. Bystanders have guessed that the acquisition was from a vanity purchase by CEO Mark Zuckerberg to a long-term attempt to develop a Google Glass competitor. Either way, Facebook has demonstrated that it is ready to reach outside its existing model. Comparatively, a news organization would not be much of a stretch.

Zuckerberg is a bright guy who has some cash at his disposal. He doesn't need me to inform him how exactly to spend it. If he can snag CNN for, say, $7 billion, it could be roughly the equivalent of me picking right up People magazine at the checkout counter. (In my case, only a copy of the most recent issue, not the actual publication itself.) If CNN catches Zuckerberg's eye, there is absolutely no doubt he'll know what related to it.

So that it wouldn't shock me if Facebook got into the news business. It could seem to be one of the more logical ways for the social network to start filling its users' news feeds.

Sources:

1) Bloomberg, "Fox's Carey Dropped Bomb on Time Warner's Bewkes Over Lunch"

2) Bloomberg, "CNN Said Valued at Up to $8 Billion by Fox with time Warner Deal"

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