Rethinking Video Journalism, NowThisNews Blitzkriegs SXSW With Coverage And A 6-Second Pitch Competition

The TV news soundbite is about to get a lot shorter. NowThisNews, a New York-based startup that’s looking to reinvent video journalism for the Facebook and smartphone era, is hitting SXSW with an exclusive channel on its mobile app plus a six-second startup pitch competition using Twitter’s Vine. While we haven’t really covered the company before, NowThisNews is the brainchild of Huffington Post co-founder Kenneth Lerer, former Huffington Post CEO Eric Hippeau, and Bedrocket founder and CEO Brian Bedol. They’ve assembled a veteran team of journalists who have held senior positions at ABC News, CNN, Washington Post and The Huffington Post with $6.5 million in funding from investors including Lerer Ventures. The startup’s basic premise is this: because smartphones and tablets are eating into the time people otherwise spend watching TV, the old cable and evening news formats just don’t work. On top of that, news spreads in a different way — through social networks like Facebook ...

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