Occupation President, BNO News Name Michael Poppel | Organizations founded BNO News | |
Full Name Michael Gerardus Johannes van Poppel Born December 20, 1989 (age 34) ( 1989-12-20 ) Tilburg, the Netherlands Profiles | ||
Michael van Poppel (born December 20, 1989 in Tilburg, the Netherlands) is the founder and President of BNO News.
Van Poppel ran a popular Twitter-based news service called BreakingNewsOn from May 13, 2007 until December 1, 2009, at which time it had nearly 1.5 million followers. The service is best known for acquiring and selling an authentic Osama bin Laden video to Reuters in September 2007 It also scooped the regular news organizations with its live accounts of the 2008 Lincolnshire earthquake in February 2008. The Twitter account was eventually acquired by MSNBC.com.
In a press release in late November 2009, Van Poppel announced plans to launch a news wire service. The news wire service launched in January 2010 with MSNBC.com as its first client. Other news organizations bought subscriptions to the service soon after.