Peter Bale, who left his role as editorial director at Times Online in October, joined Microsoft last week to take responsibility for content on MSN and other products in the UK.
He told Journalism.co.uk: "We have to move into news in a way where we avoid commoditisation. Where if we have something special to say, something worthwhile, we'll try and say it."
Mr Bale said that MSN also needed to find an appropriate voice, a tone that was unique to the portal, and consider creating more original content across the site to augment the existing relationships with news providers.
"We already have a range of terrific partners that we work with for news at the moment. We have ITN, PA, Reuters, the FT, the Guardian and others.
"We will be maximising those opportunities to draw in content. But it's also clear from some of the areas where we have done original content that we need original content as well.
"We already produce a substantial amount of original material, particularly in the Money and Entertainment area."
Mr Bale said he wanted to build on MSN's strong position in news, personal finance and entertainment. He added that, he believed, the latter would be developed 'very strongly' with video and music in the next year.
"We're very well placed to get slightly more than our share of the media advertising market and of the audience.
"The audience has a very strong attachment to Microsoft and MSN products already and if we can give them the right blend of good, high-value content and tools - and we can leverage all of that skill that Microsoft and MSN have in tools - then we should have a really effective product."
He added: "If you are using the new Internet Explorer 7 browser you can pull in anybody's content on an RSS feed so we have to be competitive in the content area.
"We can't just rely on these tools to carve out a market for us. It's wonderful to have them but it is not enough, we have got to have a good content offering as well as exploiting all these tools."
Free daily newsletter
If you like our news and feature articles, you can sign up to receive our free daily (Mon-Fri) email newsletter (mobile friendly).
