Microsoft Gears Up To Launch Internet Venture With Nbc 24-Hour News Service Is Scheduled To Make Its Debut July 15

It’s the kind of sprawling, cluttered room that feels like home to journalists. Young people clutching sheaves of paper dash between long desks packed with computer terminals. A bank of more than a dozen TV screens shows newscasters going through their paces.

It’s a newsroom with all the fixings. The only surprise: The room is in the heart of Microsoft Corp., the giant of the computer software industry. It is the company’s vessel for launching into the world of daily journalism.

On July 15, Microsoft and NBC plan to begin MSNBC, a 24-hour news service distributed on cable television and the Internet. NBC will largely run the cable side from a New Jersey center; Microsoft will run the Internet half from here.

Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates has long maintained the company wants to stay in the business that made it rich: software. But the line between that and creating content such as news and videos is increasingly blurred. Today Microsoft is experimenting with more than half a dozen ventures that look more like the media business than the software business.

“Media used to be about broadcasting information only,” said Jerry Michalski, editor of the New York-based industry newsletter Release 1.0. “We’re now seeing a move to make content more interactive. And Microsoft is positioning itself to play really well in that area.”

Among the projects:

Slate, a news magazine developed by former New Republic editor Michael Kinsley, which debuted on the World Wide Web last month.

CityScapes, an on-line project aimed at creating Web sites that describe current entertainment and cultural events in specific cities. Microsoft has not said when CityScapes might be introduced.

Web sites that offer music and film reviews. Based on Microsoft products distributed on CD-ROMs, the sites are continually updated.

Joint ventures with Black Entertainment Television and the new Hollywood studio DreamWorks SKG to develop CD-ROMs and interactive programming.

Of these, Microsoft’s partnership with NBC is by far the most ambitious. It marks a profound change for Microsoft, as well as for NBC and its 1,200 journalists. All NBC correspondents “will be filing (stories) daily with MSNBC,” said Andrew Lack, president of NBC News.

NBC’s New Jersey operation will have satellite and direct telephone links to the nearly 100 editors and journalists in Redmond, who will transform the news that NBC correspondents report into an on-line product that will be free to anyone with the gear to reach the World Wide Web.

“We think that ‘news magazine’ is a good description” of what the venture will do on the Web, said Peter Neupert, a Microsoft vice president. “We want to be about news that breaks, (but the service) will also have rich features, deeper stories.”

But the Microsoft team won’t just be recompiling stories others generate, as it did when the company first built the newsroom last August for the launch of the Microsoft Network, the company’s on-line network. When MSNBC takes to the air, Microsoft will have its own crew of reporters augmenting NBC’s coverage, Neupert said, and covering high-tech activities.

“Reporting (from Redmond) … should make sense for our medium,” said Merrill Brown, managing editor of MSNBC on the Internet.

If MSNBC proves successful, says Michalski of Release 1.0, “it will be a great boon to the company, and it will make them credible in the media world.” If it doesn’t, Microsoft’s core businesses, still based on creating software for running personal computers, will remain unscathed.