NBCUniversal News Group is announcing a minority investment in NowThisNews, a New York-based startup that’s looking to reinvent video journalism for the Facebook and smartphone era. As part of the investment, the two companies will co-produce original short-form news videos to be distributed across mobile and social platforms.
The brainchild of Huffington Post co-founder Kenneth Lerer (who also serves as Chairman of Buzzfeed), former Huffington Post CEO Eric Hippeau, and Bedrocket founder and CEO Brian Bedol, NowThis News is reinventing video news for the social and mobile worlds.
Part of this is making news accessible to newer platforms like Facebook, Vine, YouTube, Snapchat and others. Specifically, the teams will co-produce content for TODAY, MSNBC, NBC News and CNBC on topics relating to pop culture, political, and business news. These videos are posted on social platforms as well as on NowThis News’ mobile app.
The startup has a team of journalists who have held senior positions at ABC News, CNN, Washington Post and The Huffington Post and previously raised $10 million in funding from Lerer Ventures, SoftBank and others. The New York Times reports that NBC took a 10 percent stake in NowThis News.
“We know that news consumption among younger audiences continues to grow, but in order to reach that audience, we need to continue to create video for the platforms they use most. NowThis News does exactly that — delivering relevant news stories for the mobile and social platforms that resonate with this audience,” said Patricia Fili-Krushel, Chairman of the NBCUniversal News Group, in a release. “We’re excited to incorporate this relationship into our overall strategy — to innovate inside and outside the company — positioning the News Group for future success.”
Kenneth Lerer, NowThis News’s Co-Founder and Manager Director of Lerer Ventures said, “By working together, the NBCUniversal News Group and NowThis News can learn from each other and build a great digital news experience that’s a win-win for the new news consumer who wants all video, all the time, built for social and mobile. This partnership allows us to showcase our shared vision of combining the world’s strongest news brands with NowThis News to super serve consumers.”
For NBC, this is the second investment in a non-traditional news platform this year. NBC Universal just backed Re/code, the technology news site recently founded by former AllThingsD founders Walt Mossberg and Kara Swisher.
