Bloomberg's Twitter News Network, TicToc, Goes Live Dec. 18

Bloomberg Media announced the name of its built-for-Twitter 24-hour news network — TicToc by Bloomberg — which is set to go live on Dec, 18.

The company is staffing TicToc with a dedicated team of about 50 reporters, editors, producers and social-media analysts, overseen by M. Scott Havens, Bloomberg's global head of digital, and Mindy Massucci, who is the editorial lead of TicToc by Bloomberg.

The network will be available on Twitter at @tictoc (http://twitter.com/tictoc). TicToc will feature a mix of breaking news content culled from Twitter — curated and verified by Bloomberg — and Bloomberg's own live video reporting. It's a completely separate product from Bloomberg Television, according to the New York-based company.

According its twitter handle, a link would be provided to the viewers to watch live stream directly on Twitter (http://live.twitter.com/tictoc).

Bloomberg Media has landed six initial sponsors for TicToc: AT&T, CA Technologies, CME Group, Goldman Sachs, Infiniti, and TD Ameritrade. Each is paying between $1.5 million-$3 million as presenting partners, according a report by Axios. The company is expecting an eight-figured valuation.

"In an era when most viewers are choosing immediacy over quality in breaking news, traditional media hasn't kept up," Bloomberg Media CEO Justin Smith said in May when it announced the partnership with Twitter for the 24-hour news network (a statement that sounded like a mea culpa). "With this new network, we are setting out to reinvent the digital breaking-news experience."

What is behind the name Tic Toc?

TicToc is a reference to a "tick-tock" story: journalism jargon for a piece that provides a play-by-play chronology of a deal or event. According to Bloomberg, TicToc "conveys the ethos of the product — that it is timely, accurate, relevant, concise and factual."

For Twitter, TicToc by Bloomberg will be the first 24-hour live network exclusively available on the social platform. Live video has been a big push for Twitter. In Q3 the company announced around 30 new live-streaming partnerships including Major League Baseball, the NFL, Viacom, the WNBA, Live Nation, the PGA, IMG Fashion, and BuzzFeed. 

TicToc is promoted as the first global and digital news channel.