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NowPublic announced Monday that the fast-growing citizen journalism
website has scored 10.6 million dollars (US) in financing to fuel
its drive to become the world's largest news agency.
The Vancouver-based start-up says it is growing at a rate of 35
percent monthly and has nearly 120,000 contributing
"reporters" in more than 140 countries.
In part of a trend referred to as "citizen journalism,"
NowPublic lets anyone with digital cameras or a camera-enable mobile
telephones upload images or news snippets for dissemination via the
Internet.
Time Magazine lists NowPublic among its top 50 websites of 2007.
"I promise you, in 18 months NowPublic will be, by reach, the
largest news agency in the world," start-up co-founder Len
Brody told AFP.
"The most exciting thing for us is this started as an
experiment in a garage behind a house and we are breaking stories
and changing the news business."
The financing is led by Rho Ventures in the United States and
Canada.
Uses for the money will include ways to reward people that upload
stories or images, and developing a system to "geo-locate"
contributors so they can be found if they are in range of
developments deemed newsworthy.
"We are moving to geo-locating people so we can do some cool
stuff," Brody said.
"For example, if there is a bomb in a subway station in London
or a virus breaks out in Google's cafeteria and media can't get
their fast enough we can identify people on the scene already and
get their content," Brody said.
Contributors own stories they post on NowPublic, which does not pay
for submissions.
"This is really going to help us start compensating those
folks," said Brody.
NowPublic is "putting the pedal to the metal in
partnerships" with newspapers, magazines, television networks
and news wire services, according to Brody.
NowPublic was posting pictures from a deadly cyclone strike in Oman
in June by the time the region's Associated Press bureau chief was
setting out from home to cover the story, Brody said.
NowPublic contributors filed reports from inside London's Heathrow
Airport during a 2006 terrorism lockdown and from the US Gulf Coast
when it was pounded by Hurricane Katrina in 2005.
"This isn't YouTube with video of guys doing pranks in their
dorm rooms," said Brody. "This is real stuff; real news.
More and more people are seeing more and more things, carrying
mobile devices, and that creates a new army."
Participatory journalism is expected to influence traditional news
operations as reporters get tips or ideas from people online or
respond to news broken by people in the right places at the right
times.
"We become the early warning system," Brody said.
"Breaking news will be owned by organizations like NowPublic,
while the analysis side will be owned by AFP and other
organizations. That is the big change we are making."
Content at the NowPublic website is completely user-provided, with
about half of it being original and the rest links to other online
news stories.
Volunteer "deputy editors" filter inappropriate material
and let contributors know when stories are incomplete, inaccurate,
or unauthentic.
NowPublic makes its money predominately through syndication of
content and fees charged to connect established news organizations
with citizen reporters.
--AFP
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