The 19-year-old behind BreakingNewsOn

I started following BreakingNewsOn on Twitter a long time ago and I am still a follower. Largely because it does what it says on the tin – it posts tweets summarising breaking news from around the world, generally well before local media outlets pick it up.

Like many people, until yesterday I didn’t realise that BreakingNewsOn was started by a then 17-year-old, Michael van Poppel.

His story was told in a ReadWriteWeb article yesterday, which is a good read although judging by this tweet from Poppel, not entirely accurate.

That said, I can’t find anything yet that spells out what those inaccuracies might be.

In the meantime, here’s a little from the ReadWriteWeb article that was doing the rounds yesterday:

BNO has made the most of a number of different media technologies. The team is best known for its presence on Twitter – at 800k, BNO has four times more followers than ABC News and twice as many as Newsweek. BNO also makes extensive use of RSS, email, FriendFeed and now promises an iPhone app leveraging the phone’s brand new push messaging sometime next month.

In a media landscape that some argue has transcended the old models of scarcity and physical distribution – it could be efficient research infrastructure, high-quality editorial judgment and building online channels of distribution that make the difference. Or, as blogger Mike Bracco put it on The Next Web today, “Unlike their mainstream counterparts the service does a great job of only reporting news worthy of the ‘breaking’ label. I can attest to this as well as their ability to deliver breaking news before anyone else. I have found them to consistently report news 10-15 minutes before it hits mainstream websites or blogs and well before it is ever reported on TV.” In the news game today, being best and first by minutes means it’s your link that gets passed along. Breaking News Online is excelling at that game with its short, quick updates.
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Michael van Poppel used to be like a lot of young people, trawling the internet for interesting news about the world. Just like many others have considered doing, he created a place where he could post the most interesting news he finds, as fast as he can. Today he’s one of the most-watched movers and shakers in online news media – and he’s not yet twenty years old.

In September 2007, when seventeen years old and living in the Netherlands, van Poppel decided to launch a news aggregation business called Breaking News Online. Months later, somehow, he came into possession of a full video of an Osama Bin Laden statement before any of the major news outlets had it, and sold it to Reuters.

The rest is here.