Before Reddit was a household name, before Digg cratered, before the algorithmic feed ate the news industry from the inside, MySpace announced it was getting into news — with user submissions, story ratings, blog-post embedding, and Fox clips. The original FishbowlLA post was a snickering write-up of the press release. The press release was actually a pretty fair description of what happened to news distribution for the next fifteen years; it just happened to the wrong platform.
Then
In March 2007, MySpace News went live. The platform’s pitch, in the press release Kate Coe was working from, had four elements. First, dynamic aggregation of “real-time news and blogs from top sites around the Web,” organized into topical pages. Second, user interaction — rating and commenting on every news item. Third, user submission of stories users thought were cool. Fourth, user authorship — pieces “from their MySpace blog” pulled into the news flow. And separately, the cross-promotional play: Fox News (then sister-corporate to MySpace under Murdoch’s News Corp) had just enabled MySpace users to embed Fox clips on their pages, and Courtney Friel was the on-air face MySpace seemed to imagine its members would be promoting.
The original Kate Coe post made fun of this by running the press release in alternating paragraphs with the obvious objection — that if news is socially curated, it is also socially curatable into garbage, and the garbage that would dominate a 2007 MySpace audience was kitty content. “Happy kitty stories will dominate news coverage, generating a whole new Pulitzer category” was the joke. The joke was funny because it was clearly right.
What the joke buried was that the actual product description was a pretty exact account of the news-distribution model that would, within a few years, eat the news industry: algorithmic aggregation, user-submitted ranking signals, embedded video from a parent network, and a feed that prioritized engagement over editorial judgment. Replace “MySpace News” with “Facebook News Feed” or “Reddit r/news” or “Twitter trending” and the architecture is identical. The kitty content joke turned out to be a description of cat videos as the dominant native content of the next decade.
Now
MySpace as a platform peaked in mid-2008 and then experienced one of the steepest declines in social-platform history. Justin Timberlake’s investor group bought a minority stake in 2011, the platform pivoted to music, and the entity that hosts MySpace.com today is functionally a music-and-archive site, not a competitor to anything. The news vertical described in the 2007 launch was decommissioned years ago.
The model itself — social-graph distribution of news, user-rated rankings, comment-stream engagement — is what Facebook turned into a global business and is now what Meta is in the middle of a multi-year retreat from. Facebook News in the United States shut down in April 2024 after a long deprioritization of news content in the feed. Instagram and Threads have explicitly stated they are not building news products. The same arc happened in slower motion at Twitter (now X), where news distribution remains active but is no longer treated as a strategic priority by the company. The Reddit IPO in March 2024 valued a more honest version of the social-news idea at around $6 billion — basically the genre Kate Coe was making fun of, finally monetized two decades later.
Courtney Friel left Fox News in 2010 and has spent the years since at KTLA in Los Angeles, where she anchors the morning newscasts. She published a memoir in 2023 about her broadcast career and recovery from alcohol use. She did not, contrary to the original FBLA gag, end up the queen of happy kitty news. The format itself, though, did make a few people very rich.
Original report archived on the Wayback Machine: November 2009 snapshot