Citizen journalism, "crowd powered media" company NowPublic Technologies Inc. of Vancouver now has US$10.6 million to play with courtesy of U.S. venture capitalists.
"This round of financing will enable NowPublic to further its goal of being the largest news network in the world with more people on the ground in the right places and at the right times to report news," said the company in a statement.
"This financing represents the largest single commitment to citizen generated news yet assembled by a company in the category," it added.
NowPublic began in 2005, in what it calls the "emerging field of citizen journalism," where anyone can contribute to the site in various ways such as adding text, photos, video or audio. It currently employs about 20 people in Vancouver, the United States and other countries.
The company says it has 100,000 non-professional contributing reporters to its website from more than 140 countries and 3,600 cities.
Here's some excerpts from the Globe and Mail story:
The financing arrangement is one of the largest such deals involving a citizen-journalism service, a group that includes the popular Korean-based site Oh My News, U.S.-based Newsvine.com, and NewAssignment.net, which is run by New York University journalism professor Jay Rosen. ...
The company says it now has more than 100,000 "reporters" in 140 countries and almost 4,000 cities, who have filed reports about everything from Hurricane Katrina and the grounding of a ferry in Alaska to a shooting in downtown Vancouver. Just over a year ago, the service had about 13,000 members.
In one of the most recent examples of NowPublic reporting, Mr. Brody said a man who was close to the oil pipe that ruptured on a street in Burnaby video-taped the oil geyser and posted it to NowPublic, and later sold the footage to Associated Press.
NowPublic, which has an existing content-sharing arrangement with Associated Press, also announced that it is expanding that relationship. The previous deal allowed AP bureaus outside of the U.S. to use NowPublic content, and that arrangement has been expanded to include all of AP's U.S. bureaus as well.
The Vancouver company, whose chairman is veteran newsman and former MSNBC executive Merrill Brown, said NowPublic's 20,000 members in hurricane-prone areas will be helping Associated Press cover extreme weather events, among other things. ...
Not all citizen-journalism sites have been as successful as NowPublic. A venture called Backfence, which tried to apply the citizen-journalism model to several local U.S. markets and received venture financing from several prominent funds, announced recently that it was closing.
"That was a sad day for citizen journalism," Mr. Brody said. "They were pioneers. But they had a very different model than we do. They were focued on hyper-local news, and we are really global."
Jay Rosen's NewAssignment.net, meanwhile, has formed a joint venture called Off The Bus with the popular news website The Huffington Post, in which "citizen reporters" will file news updates about events on the U.S. election-campaign trail.
Mr. Brody said that he and NowPublic chairman Brown know Mr. Rosen well, and that the two companies may work together on a citizen journalism project at some point in the future.
Here's the NowPublic website, and here's the news release.
Here's a related post at Publishing 2.0: It's not citizen journalism or crowdsourcing -- it's just journalism.