By Caitlin Fitzsimmons: Reuters has become the first news organisation to build a presence on news prediction web startup Hubdub. Hubdub, which is based in Edinburgh but has a mainly US audience, lets users make predictions and bet with virtual money on the outcome of news events. Previously its only partnership with a news organisation was the Huffington Post, which syndicates some Hubdub content on its own site.

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The Reuters section within Hubdub will allow Reuters editors to generate questions, ranging from the credit crunch to the 2008 US presidential election. Tools and resources within the Reuters community include a friends application, comment capabilities, links to the top Reuters stories of the day and Reuters market widgets. Besides voting to predict the outcome, users can find out the prevailing public opinion on any particular topic.

Nigel Eccles, the chief executive and co-founder of Hubdub, says he hopes the Reuters partnership will be the first of many collaborations with news organisations. “Journalists are right on the news and ideally placed to create questions that are topical and have a wide following,” Eccles says. “I see a shift in journalism with journalists able to use their audience more for things we don’t know and journalists don’t know.”

Eccles says the benefits to Reuters include promoting their brand to a wider audience and creating deeper engagement with its own audience. He adds that Hubdub has found people are five times more likely to vote on a prediction than leave a comment. Hubdub has been running since the end of January and has about 150,000 unique users per month, 80 percent of whom are in the US.

Here’s an example of a Reuters news vote…

Which of these banks will be the next victim of the credit crisis?