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19-Year-Old Singlehandedly Changing Online News

by Leila Brillson on July 18, 2009 at 08:07 AM


When then 17-year old Michael van Poppel somehow got his hands on an Osama bin Laden videotape two years ago and sold it to Reuters before anyone else had even heard of it, the landscape of media changed, so claims ReadWriteWeb. Van Poppel owns the Netherlands-based news aggregator, Breaking News Online, which operates under a simple, anti-large scale news source premise: smaller, people-run agencies can find, edit, and distribute world events faster than large media outlets. Since the sale, BNO has become the go-to news source for, well, go-to news sources, usually beating mass competitors by ten or fifteen minutes.

The young van Poppel is intrinsically tech savvy. He has taken to live-blogging, a perfect forum to break news as it occurs. BNO has over 800,000 Twitter followers (four times as many as ABC and twice as many as Newsweek). He's one-upping major mainstream outlets as well, with RSS feeds and daily e-mails, and he's now producing an iPhone application.

The app market is undoubtedly hot, but van Poppel takes his new iPhone app to the next level. While CNN and ABC offer their applications for free, BNO costs $1.99. Furthermore, it adds a $0.99 a month subscription fee, practically unheard of for a service that essentially culls breaking news from the source. Therefore, van Poppel, who now has editors located in the US, Ireland, and Mexico all monitoring wires and the Twitter stream, is charging for the (albeit, well-chosen) content produced by others.

All eyes are on BNO, partly because this would be a great example of an independent media source out-maneuvering mega-outlets, but also to see who objects to its news regurgitation. After all, if BNO succeeds, that would mean a 19-year old kid has found a way to make sending links to original sources more profitable than the publishers themselves. [From: ReadWriteWeb]

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Tags: BNO, breaking news, BreakingNews, iphone app, iphone apps, IphoneApp, IphoneApps, kids, news, teenmoguls, teens, top

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