Michael van Poppel

Michael van Poppel
Born
Michael Gerardus Johannes van Poppel

Tilburg, the Netherlands
Occupation(s)President, BNO News
Websitehttp://www.bnonews.com/

Michael van Poppel (born in Tilburg, the Netherlands) is the founder and President of BNO News.

Van Poppel ran a popular Twitter-based news service called BreakingNews from May 2007 until December 2009. It scooped regular news organizations on political news, natural disasters, and other breaking news and grew quickly in 2009, when it went from 16,000 followers to more 1.5 million, making it one of the most popular news services on Twitter at that time.[1][2]

On September 7, 2007, Van Poppel obtained an authentic videotape featuring Al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden, which BNO News licensed to the Reuters news agency.[1][3][2] In February 2009, BNO News won the Best in News award at the 1st Shorty Awards in New York.[4]

The BreakingNews Twitter account was acquired by NBC News in December 2019.[2]

In a press release in late November 2009, Van Poppel announced plans to offer a subscription-based news wire service to other news outlets, primarily those in the United States.[2] The news wire service launched in January 2010 with NBC News as its first client. Other news organizations bought subscriptions to the service soon after.[5]

  1. ^ a b "@BreakingNewsOn: From Twitter Account To Public News Wire Service". TechCrunch.
  2. ^ a b c d "MSNBC.com takes over Breaking News Twitter feed". BBC News.
  3. ^ "CNN's I-Report did not respond to Bin Laden video offer from web trawler". Archived from the original on September 29, 2011. Retrieved September 29, 2011.
  4. ^ "The 2008 Shorty Awards Winners and Finalists". The Shorty Awards. Archived from the original on July 12, 2019.
  5. ^ "MSNBC's Dutch Tweet", Forbes, January 25, 2010