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This chapter focuses on the construction of MSNBC.com's web video player, the primary means by which NBC's cable news and broadcast news programs were made available to users and audiences online. More specifically, it examines the video player's interface and other features in order to elucidate the complex relationships, interests, and motivations devoted to the design of the everyday objects used in online distribution. It also considers the importance of syndication to MSNBC's web presence and how MSNBC.com was able to dramatically expand the reach of its online video by pushing clips to other web properties in Microsoft's online services division, including Bing and MSN.

This chapter examines how the blog of The Rachel Maddow Show (TRMS) was born. Rachel Maddow reportedly disliked the appearance of the blogs generated by MSNBC's obsolete Community Server software. Furthermore, Microsoft's branding and visual identity guidelines, mandated for all MSN-affiliated sites, put limits on what a new Newsvine-powered blog design could look like. This chapter comments on the hiring of Laura Conaway as a TRMS web producer and the level of integration among the show's various products that she promised. It also considers MSNBC.com's launch of a Newsvine blog, the weblog for NBC News's Elkhart Project, along with the creation of the Maddow Blog and the extensive heterogeneous engineering that turned it into a complete website. Finally, it describes the major changes in the digital distribution strategy for MSNBC.com and MSNBC TV after TRMS launched its own blog.

This epilogue provides an update on MSNBC and NBC News's footprint in the distribution of online television news since their acquisition by Comcast, with particular emphasis on the restructuring of MSNBC.com into an expanded NBC News Digital and the creation of an entirely new website for the MSNBC cable news channel. It discusses other changes at MSNBC, including the rebranding of the Blue Site as NBCNews.com, the creation of a new MSNBC.com based on the open source content management system Drupal, and the use of the “Newsvine 3.0” commenting system as the basis for all the community features on the new site. Despite some changes that seem to show the influence of a centralized management and hierarchy, complex assemblages of system builders remain both inside and outside the MSNBC organization. Heterarchy is alive and well within MSNBC's constellation of companies and teams.

This chapter examines the “off-site” and mobile distribution of MSNBC video, including the development of functionality that allowed the video player to be embedded on users' personal websites and various technical solutions developed or purchased by MSNBC.com for piping its video to phones and tablets. It discusses the involvement of a range of “business-to-business” distribution firms whose goal is to develop and sell video players, search functionality, and other white-label products that bear the brand of the content provider rather than the manufacturer. It also considers the role of these “business-to-business” companies, dubbed “transparent intermediaries,” in creating the business models used by media companies in the online video marketplace. The chapter concludes by showing how MSNBC.com tailored many of the features of its video player to the demands of the conversation economy.

This chapter focuses on conceptual tools used for considering large contemporary media organizations like MSNBC. It examines a nonmonolithic framework for elucidating how MSNBC's digital distribution is influenced by organizational factors and shows how keeping pace with rapidly transforming production and distribution environments has altered the way that legacy media institutions are organized. It also discusses the emergence of heterarchy as a novel form of organizational structure that allows media conglomerates to cope with perpetual uncertainty. Finally, it analyzes the provincialism of Internet technologies in newsrooms by drawing on a number of theoretical frameworks from the sociology of technology. The chapter argues that large media organizations are not single actors with singular objectives, but complex and dynamic assemblages of individuals, groups, and technologies whose interrelations all influence the flow of content.

This chapter traces the origins of Newsvine.com is a news-themed social network founded in 2005 and acquired by MSNBC.com two years later. To understand what Newsvine was and what it did, the chapter explains where it came from. Newsvine was MSNBC.com's first-ever acquisition, and its role within MSNBC.com had expanded substantially. The Newsvine technology now powers all of the blogs and nearly all of the user-community features on MSNBC.com, as well as on the extended MSNBC Digital Network. This chapter describes several phases in the evolution of MSNBC's collection of blogs and interactive technologies. It also considers the array of tools and strategies implemented by Newsvine to build its user base into a self-policing community that consistently delivered palatable and high-quality content. Finally, it examines Newsvine.com's business model and suggests that the site was in many ways a remarkable achievement of heterogeneous engineering.

This book explores how infrastructures and strategies for distributing online television news are developed and maintained. Focusing on MSNBC, a hybrid company built to link television and the Internet, it challenges often-simplistic assumptions about how media is produced and considers the route that online news takes to reach consumers. It discusses the notion of “conversation economy,” articulated by John Battelle in his 2005 book The Search, and the tendency of online journalists to select story topics partially on the basis of whether an article is likely to generate page views through sharing and search. Part 1 of the book considers the path taken by MSNBC television programs as they made their way to online audiences; Part 2 examines MSNBC's online distribution platforms from the vantage points of different system builders within the larger organization; and Part 3 focuses on how MSNBC's distribution channels were built to serve a broad array of online audiences.

This chapter examines media distribution within the context of sociotechnical systems. It begins with a discussion of the concept of recalcitrance and its relation to heterogeneous engineering before turning to technologies as parts of heterogeneous systems. It then considers the persistence of heterogeneous engineering in the world of online television news distribution, along with time delay as an example of how the route of online video is influenced by the various forces and architects involved in online and social television news distribution. It also describes the distribution system developed by MSNBC for online television news in the years leading up to 2010 by tracing how a typical cable news program is brought to online audiences.

This chapter examines the case of The Rachel Maddow Show (TRMS) and how it developed a new and different online strategy that ultimately became the model for other MSNBC television programs. TRMS is a cable news site that has grown into a great success story of television on the web. Consistently ranking at the top of many popular online audience metrics, TRMS is considered one of the top three sites attached to cable news programs. This chapter considers how Rachel Maddow's characterization of herself and her affinity for the web has contributed to TRMS's online efforts. It also looks at the appointment of Will Femia as a single, dedicated web producer for TRMS and Femia's use of standard templates to simulate blogware.

This chapter considers the notion of “conversation economy” as well as MSNBC.com's strategy of cultivating numerous brands to capture the attention and sharing activity of different niche audiences. It begins with a discussion of the concept of epistemic cultures introduced by Karin Knorr Cetina before turning to the shared links and embeddable media objects that drive so much traffic in the conversation economy. It then examines the factors that make the conversation economy especially salient to media practitioners, including the dramatic increase in media choice. It also analyzes the impact of audience fragmentation and high media choice on distribution decisions, along with the initiatives undertaken by MSNBC.com to deal with the challenges of moving content in the conversation economy. Finally, it explains how the demands of the web and the logic of branding could be recalcitrant from the perspective of the provincial system builders at MSNBC.

This chapter examines Newsvine's new group commenting architecture that was designed to help make governable the behavior and (frequent lack of) norms exhibited by users. It first describes Newsvine's so-called “pre-moderation” strategy, which subjected all user comments on MSNBC.com blogs to moderation before they appeared anywhere on the site. It then considers the notion of “mass reach without mass mediation” to describe the increasingly common relationship between niche brands and editorial cultures on the one hand, and developers building highly flexible software architectures on the other. It also discusses Newsvine's decision to launch a new comment moderation system in 2010 and concludes with an assessment of how provincialism was affected by the coordination involved in the rise of niche brands and flexible platforms.

This book has explored trends in the distribution of online television news and the underlying sociotechnical systems by looking at the case of MSNBC. It has described concepts and offered insights regarding new and emerging organizational forms and distribution networks that are often said to be hallmarks of the Internet. It has suggested that many significant relationships shaping both access to content and the nature of the systems delivering it can be discovered by tracing the path of media as it reaches its intended audience. This concluding chapter discusses contemporary, multifaceted media organizations and their efforts at online distribution. It also considers the notions of epistemic cultures and heterogeneous engineering and how tracing out the “voltas” of media distribution allows us to reevaluate the so-called “moments of tracing.” Finally, it assesses the role of transparent intermediaries, or “business-to-business” distribution firms, in the distribution of a provider's content while remaining invisible to end users.

This chapter shows how both traditional news outlets and the newer cable outlets have attempted to follow audiences' points of view in constructing the news by analyzing demands for gratification. It also presents a case study which tracks the development of the three major cable news networks, CNN, FNC, and MSNBC. These networks have blatantly used their content to chase after different portions of ideologically segmented audiences. Because of the nature of 24-hour news and the economics of cable, cable news providers are able to position themselves along an ideological continuum, appealing only to a segment of the broader audience. Not only do demands for ideologically gratifying news drive specific content on each channel, but the distribution of ideology in the public has driven the entire structure of the cable news market.

This chapter focuses on cable news. For more than a decade, CNN spread to cable systems across the United States with no major competitors. Yet what is commonly thought of as “cable news” today—as a distinct genre or style of news storytelling—did not start to fully emerge until Fox News and MSNBC launched in 1996, beginning the “cable news wars.” Most of the distinctive characteristics associated with cable news, wherein it started to break away from high-modern conventions, evolved after 1996. The competition led to an atmosphere with each outlet fighting first for ratings, while CNN had initially put at least as much emphasis on fighting for its respectability as a news outlet.

This chapter investigates whether the consumption of Fox, MSNBC, and CNN is associated with the formation of conservative or liberal political attitudes. Through analyzing public opinion data collected by the Pew Research Center between 2004 and 2016, the chapter presents a regression analysis that finds little evidence of a liberal polarizing effect for CNN and MSNBC consumption on political attitudes, while finding both selective exposure and polarization to be at work in regard to Fox News consumption. These findings corroborate those of network analysts who have identified a structural asymmetry in political polarization within online media—with right-wing news audiences more insular and their preferred media more ideologically self-reinforcing than their counterparts on the liberal left. The chapter argues that asymmetrical polarization in general, and in conservative news in particular, has measurable effects on political attitude formation among cable television consumers.