A blogger from Reuters has reported that CNN is in late talks to purchase social media and news blog Mashable for at least $200 million. The acquisition was the talk of the town at South by Southwest this past weekend and would be CNN's largest to date.

Felix Salmon says "a little bird told him" that the news giant could announce the acquisition as early as Tuesday, although TechCrunch is now reporting that Mashable founder Pete Cashmore is denying the rumors to senior level editors at the blog. CNN has also denied that any announcement would be made tomorrow but declined to comment on the possibility of an acquisition.

According to the NY Times, Cashmore's email to this staff denies that "Mashable will be acquired this week." Reading into it a bit, such a statement doesn't rule out the possibility of the site being acquired, say, next week. Interestingly enough, executive editor at Mashable "liked" Salmon's story regarding the acquisition on Facebook. Sheer coincidence, or could there be more to that?

Cashmore founded Mashable in 2005 from his home in Aberdeen, Scotland. The site primarily covers social media news but has recently branched out to include entertainment, online video, business and gadget coverage. The site brings in around 20 million unique visitors per month and over 50 million page views, making it one of the largest sites on the Internet. Mashable's Twitter page has over 2.7 million followers and 840,000+ subscribers on Facebook.