Would you like to invest in @BreakingNews on Twitter.com?
From: Trading Goddess<tgchats@gmail.com>
To: TradingGoddess
Received: Sunday, May 10, 2009 03:18 AM
Hello,
I am authorized on behalf of @BreakingNews on Twitter.com to inquire if you would be interested in investing in their company.
Here is some information about their plans.
"Right now, we are maintaining a news service on Twitter as you probably know (@BreakingNews) with currently some 357,000 followers and it's growing fast now. Over the last months, we have created a large news-gathering system and a small but efficient team to keep the service up and running 24/7.
The initial reason we started creating a news-gathering system was to provide more unique content in our updates, but over the last months this has significantly developed and is currently providing us with news directly from officials throughout the U.S. but also from thousands of media outlets and unofficial sources. It is created in a way to avoid problems like the Associated Press has with its news-gathering, making them slower. Also, we have maintained personal contacts with a number of officials with federal, state and local agencies to provide us further information on (breaking) news stories.
In short, it was initially created to improve our Twitter account with original news but has since developed into a system that is capable of much more and over the past months we have worked on what a new news wire service can look like, and what we need for it.
With the current economic situation, publications are closing while others are reducing their workforce, they are looking for alternatives to reduce their spending. The Associated Press is currently the market leader and, especially in the local media sector, they face little competition. This is making it easy for them to charge outrageous prices, with just average size publications paying hundreds of thousands of dollars per year. Many of them have voiced their complaints and a number of clients have already decided to drop the entire AP service.
We have witnessed first hand that AP can take literally hours to process official information as "breaking news" and the organization is unfair to their costumers on a lot of fronts. For example, as part of AP's agreement, publications have to allow the AP using their content - without attribution to the source. AP rewrites the story from local publications as their own and publishes them on the news wire, which is then picked up national (these news reports end with a tiny editors note saying "Information from:" but this note is usually not published for the public).
These are already some points why publications are not happy with AP and especially during the current situation, publications are looking for a cheaper alternative. Our plan, for BNO News, is to create a new international news agency with most of its content focused on the United States (national and local) - local media in the US would be our prime market. BNO News will also focus on breaking and developing stories, with a fast-moving news wire service and offering the service at a far lower price than for example the AP. After all, whether its on local level, state level, national level or international level, breaking news (and developing stories) are the stories what people are often most interested in.
I would be happy to go into more detail to explain how this will exactly work, if needed. But I think this describes the current situation of the news industry and where there can be taken advantage from it. BNO News will be able to offer a news wire service in the same way as other news agencies currently do, with even more features to it (besides the traditional news wire feeds which go directly into newsroom programs, also options for services like personalized e-mail notification and a (login protected) online version of the news wire. Our Twitter service could continue but with a series of modifications - only offering a low amount of updates linking to the major BNO News articles.
To show we are able to deliver original content fast and detailed, we are currently publishing a small amount of news stories on our Twitter service. Examples: http://www.bnonews.com/news/306.html (international story), http://www.bnonews.com/news/302.html (local story) and http://www.bnonews.com/news/299.html (breaking story). And these are currently often even created by just one or two persons, and the information is still reported before other media. We know a lot of journalists are following our Twitter service and we often hear from news organizations because they are interested in what we will soon offer. For instance, CNN has said our service was the place where they first learned of a Boeing 737 which crashed in Amsterdam recently, and BNO News on Twitter brought the news even before Dutch national media. But also, we earlier obtained an unpublished videotape of Al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden which was sold to the Reuters news agency and made news across the world. Besides that, we were first to report a large number of local, national and international news stories before any other news outlet, like with the recent Madoff scandal, the large plane crashes in New York City and Buffalo, NY and the deadly shooting in a NY immigration center.
That's why we are currently looking for investors, to make the service a reality. Our plans are already worked out in details and we are pretty much ready to go. For the launch we need about 400,000 to 500,000 over the first 12 months. We expect that, when we get the opportunity to do this right, the service can start making profit within several years. If you like to see the breakdown of the 400 to 500,000 USD, I'd be happy to provide it to you."
Please let me know at your earliest convenience if you have interest in investing, and I will forward your email address to the founder of @BreakingNews.