Put some news in our news feeds

Picking up some breaking news remains a familiar practice even in the digital age, whether it’s grabbing a New York Times with your Starbucks or a USA Today while waiting to board a plane.

For a company with deep pockets, CNN can become the next big news impulse buy.

Rupert Murdoch has made a bold $75 billion offer for Time Warner. While the purchase is far from certain, one of the many possible side effects of such a deal would be the sale of CNN, to avoid antitrust issues due to conflicts with Fox News. The CNN sale, if it occurred, could fetch between $6 billion and $8 billion, an unnamed person familiar with the matter told Bloomberg. (1)

Speculations abound as to which company would want to acquire CNN, should the cable network become available. Popular guesses include CBS, Disney, and Yahoo. Google, though less likely, has also been mentioned as a contender; Porter Bibb, managing partner at Mediatech Capital Partners, said the network could be a perfect complement to Google-owned YouTube. (2)

This speculation got me thinking: What about Facebook?

Facebook announced earlier this year that it would acquire WhatsApp for $19 billion. That price was about three times CNN’s estimated value, for a company that had, at most, $300 million in revenue at the time the deal was announced. I have no opinion on the WhatsApp deal, mainly because I have almost no idea what WhatsApp does. (At my age, this ignorance is allowed, if not encouraged. Thanks to Google I understand, vaguely, that WhatsApp allows users to send messages and share information, which I thought I was already doing.) However, I do know that CNN has real viewers and makes real profits, though not huge.

I spend a large part of each day gathering information. I search a variety of news sites to find things that are important to me. I also check Facebook to find out about the people who are important to me. Because these people often share and comment on news, and because I sometimes react to the things they share, Facebook no doubt already has an idea of ​​what topics are important to me. If Facebook wanted to save me the trouble of scanning six news sites a day, I’d be happy to tell you more.

It has long been taken for granted that Facebook wants to know as much as possible about what its users are doing on the Internet. And of course, Facebook wants to maximize the amount of time its users spend on Facebook. So why wouldn’t Facebook want to get into the business of giving me news that I, in turn, could share with my friends? It would mean my friends and I would spend more time on the social network, which is exactly what Facebook and its advertisers want.

Facebook also has a history of acquisitions, not all of which were intuitive from the outside. In a smaller deal than its WhatsApp purchase, the company acquired virtual reality startup Oculus VR earlier this year. Viewers have guessed that the acquisition was everything from a vanity purchase by CEO Mark Zuckerberg to a long-term attempt to develop a competitor to Google Glass. Either way, Facebook has shown that it’s willing to go beyond its current model. Comparatively, a news organization would not be much of a stretch.

Zuckerberg is a brilliant guy who has some money at his disposal. He doesn’t need me to tell him how to spend it. If he can get CNN for, say, $7 billion, that would be about the equivalent of me picking up People magazine at the checkout. (In my case, just a copy of the latest issue, not the post itself.) If CNN gets Zuckerberg’s attention, there’s no doubt he’ll know what to do with it.

So I wouldn’t be surprised if Facebook got into the news business. It would seem to be one of the most logical ways for the social network to fill the news of its users.

Sources:

1) Bloomberg, “Fox’s Carey dropped a bombshell on Time Warner’s Bewkes over lunch”

2) Bloomberg, “CNN Said Valued at Up to $8 Billion by Fox in Time Warner Deal”