CNN is in talks to buy technology and social media blog Mashable for $200 million, reports say.
The acquisition of Mashable could bolster CNN.com -- one of the most popular news Web sites in the United States, and it would be “a statement about CNN’s interest in startups and social media,” Brian Stelter, a media reporter for The New York Times, wrote Monday.
Reuters blogger Felix Salmon reports that the deal to buy Mashable will cost the unit of Time Warner more than $200 million, and that an announcement is expected for Tuesday.
However, Mashable’s CEO Pete Cashmore has denied reports of the CNN acquisition, according to the technology news website TechCrunch.com.
Officials for CNN and Mashable were not immediately available for comment. A CNN spokeswoman, Christa Robinson, told Reuters: “We do not engage in speculation about our business and we aren't commenting on these reports.”
News of the potential deal spread rapidly among attendees at South by Southwest, a technology conference in Austin, Texas, that “celebrates the kind of old-and-new-media combination that CNN and Mashable would represent,” The Times’ Stelter wrote.
The seven-year-old Mashable would be CNN.com’s largest acquisition to date, Stelter reported.
Known for its social media and technology coverage, Mashable has expanded recently to include business and entertainment coverage. It has hired aggressively and partnered with a number of mainstream news websites, including CNN, according to The Times.
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