Big news in the social-media space: MSNBC has acquired Newsvine, a pioneering news community that has been somewhat eclipsed by Digg and other sites in terms of public profile over the past year or two, but has continued to grow and prosper outside of the spotlight. Newsvine was founded in 2005 by Mike Davidson and a number of other former Disney Group and ESPN staffers, and was arguably ahead of its time in terms of design and interactivity.

I haven’t written about Newsvine in quite a while, but I was impressed by the service when I first tried it out during the beta trials last year, and I am even more impressed by how they have managed to grow and yet stay focused on their core principles — and done so while taking only $1.5-million in funding, as Mike Arrington points out. That is a model that other Web 2.0 companies would be wise to follow.

For MSNBC, the acquisition accomplishes something obvious: it allows the news site to incorporate social and community features without having to develop them itself. For Newsvine, it most likely solves the issue of ongoing funding, and gives the site a much larger community to draw from when it comes to interactivity, and more exposure for the writers that the site has developed.

Rex Sorgatz, who is not only executive producer of MSNBC.com but also the proprietor of the excellent Fimoculous blog, has some thoughts about the deal that are well worth reading. As he puts it:

“[Big media] needs fixing, now more than ever. And fixing it is about finding its roots — news as conversation, as a network, as a platform. By reconstituting media as participation, Newsvine suddenly makes news fun and engaging again.”

I have to agree with Rex, who has also worked for big media for a decade or so: big media is hard. It is resistant to change — and even when it does decide to move, it does so at a glacial pace, for a whole pile of reasons. Many mainstream news sites are trying to incorporate more social features, but it’s not something that comes easily, or instinctively. If buying Newsvine can help MSNBC do some more of that, then more power to them.

MSNBC’s story on the acquisition is here, and Mike Davidson’s thoughts on the deal are here. Rafat Ali at PaidContent says that his guesstimate of the purchase price is between $5-million and $7-million (others think that it could be more), and Richard MacManus has some perspective on the acquisition at Read/Write Web. More coverage and opinion in the New York Times, at Jeremy Wagstaff’s Loose Wire blog (where he talks about the thorny issue of compensation for “user-generated content”), at Newsroomnext and at ParisLemon.

The Netscape-Digg story is the gift that just keeps on giving. First there was the offer from Jason Calacanis, formerly of Weblogs Inc., to pay the top submitters on Digg, Newsvine and Reddit if they started submitting stories to the new Digg-style Netscape site. That led to a mild flame-war between Jason and Digg founder Kevin Rose. And now Jason has updated everyone on the results of his little strategy (which some applauded and some — okay it was Mike Arrington at TechCrunch — criticized as an act of desperation) in a recent post.

According to Jason, Netscape has hired three of the top 12 Digg submitters and the top submitter from both Newsvine and Reddit. He also has some stats on how active the top Diggers are (I’d be interested in hearing Kevin’s take on those stats at some point), and expresses them in his typically restrained fashion:

“The top 10 users on DIGG are responsible for 30% of the front page stories on DIGG. That’s 3% of total front page stories each!!! Think about that for a second… the top 10 users of DIGG do 3% of the work each–that is stunning. They get paid nothing but they are responsible for 3% of the total content on the home page. Wow. Like WOW, WOW, WOW!”

Despite all the sturm und drang about the payment offer from Netscape, it’s possible that this deal could turn out to be good for everyone: Netscape has gotten lots of publicity and will get some motivated submitters, and the loss of a few people from Digg and one each from Newsvine and Reddit isn’t likely to hurt them. In fact, the Newsvine member who accepted the deal has a post up about his decision, which is well worth reading. He remains committed to Newsvine as a community, even though he will be paid to submit to Netscape.

Erick Schonfeld of Business 2.0′s blog also has an interesting post that jumps off from the Netscape issue. He says Derek Powazek — whose wife writes the Flickr blog — is publishing a print magazine that contains user-submitted photos, and plans to launch a series of magazines that contain user-submitted content and photos. He said he plans to pay contributors if the magazines start to actually make money.

Mike Davidson, the CEO of Newsvine — a kind of news aggregator/blog hub — has a nice post up on his site reacting to some of the recent commentary about Gather.com, to which Newsvine has been compared by many (including me in this post) . Rather than take any delight in a competitor getting weak early reviews — for the record, I think it still has potential — Mike makes a few good points in his post, entitled “The Proof Is In The People.”

Among other things, he says that being a media darling isn’t necessarily an indicator of future success, and that many great things were originally greeted with skepticism. Mike also points out that “an entrepreneur who always thinks along the lines of everyone else will produce a product or service just like everyone else’s. That’s usually a bad thing.” And he is right. He also says that the Newsvine team is going to keep their heads down and “keep learning from our users and admitting we only know half of what we think we know. The moment you think you understand everything about the market you’re entering is the moment you exit it.”

Words of wisdom, Mike. And for what it’s worth, I like the service a lot (I’m beta testing). I haven’t been seeding as much as I probably should be, but I do like it — particularly the commenting. Not sure about the live chatting, but time will tell.