“Crowd sourced” news network NowPublic.com has closed a $10.6 milion series A round of financing led by Rho Ventures with seed investors Brightspark and the Working Opportunity Fund participating.
Crowd sourcing is part of the widely expanding “citizen journalism” category, which encompasses all the new ways non-professionals can participate in the news reporting process. Examples range from commenting, voting on stories, to full out blogging. News commentator Jeff Jarvis has written extensively on the subject. NowPublic is a website that provides these tools to the public so they can report on what is going on around them. Many other news startups also incorporate these tools in different ways, such as NewsVine, OutsideIn, Digg, CitizenBay, recently Topix, and the now defunct Backfence.
On the spectrum of citizen journalism, NowPublic is considered a “crowd sourced” news network since stories rely on many bits of contributed content instead of a small group of users.
On NowPublic, anyone can sign up for the site and start contributing to stories in the usual categories (politics, culture, entertainment, …) or even local news. Users can write their own stories and upload their own photos (mobile), or simply submit a story from somewhere else on the web. Each of the submissions ranked in the category based on the number of votes they get. Editors can also come in and adjust the rankings based on breaking news and spamming.
Traction is one of the hardest things to build in community based startups. Citizen journalism startup Bayosphere was shut down after it couldn’t attract enough contributors. However, NowPublic reports to have over 118,000 members from over 140 countries and 3,800 cities. The site does over 1 million uniques per month. They have a hardcore audience of about 15 - 20,000 exceptionally active contributors that put up anywhere from 2 to 5 stories each month.
NowPublic seems to work best in times of crisis where it can serve as a hub for reports from people on the ground. During Hurricane Katrina, the site received over 2,000 people writing and posting about what was going on. NowPublic also reportedly broke news in the Virginia Tech shooting, the grounding of an Alaskan ferry, a bombing drill gone wrong in New Jersey and a murder in Vancouver.
The ability to be places where news media aren’t always present has led to a partnership with the Associated Press. AP has started purchasing stories and photos from the site based on the submitters asking price. NowPublic can cover areas AP’s 4,000 staff members aren’t and will be particularly focused on hurricane prone parts of the country as hurricane season approaches. While they are currently not taking any portion of the proceeds, in the future NowPublic plans on taking 25% cut. They have 7 to 10 other major partnerships lined up as well.
The Vancouver-based company was originally started in 2005.
See all
Post
Wow. I’ll be dreaming of their investor pitch all night.
Good article, Nick.
I think NowPublic is a lot more about “Crowd sourced news” than some of the other sites mentioned in the article such as Digg or Topix. This is, after all, about people writing and reporting stuff, not about aggregating what’s being said somewhere else.
Good for them.
Good information, I’ll look forward to future comments.
Regards, Dorothy at grammology
didn’t a site with the same basic idea get deadpooled a while back?
This should be renamed “outsourced news delivery for major news agencies.” That’s a real business model and that’s what NowPublic is doing. This is a much better model than Digg’s. Digg isn’t even worth $10.6 MM. I pity the fool that buys that worthless company since none of its users ever click on any ads.
It’s an interesting concept. Sounds to me like a more evolved version of digg, focusing on real “news” rather than a “top 10 list of the most amazing xxxxxx ever!!!”
I think it really sums up this definition of web 2.0 : You give the content, they make the money?
I’m not so sure about those members. I myself am a member. I had never heard of it before yesterday evening, and I still have only read one article. The thing is: I received an e-mail from nowpublic, stating that a Flickr photo of mine was used (I use CC licenses, so it’s ok) in an article there; I only had to give permission by clicking a link. After having clicked it, I had to register to approve of this. It seemed ok, and the registration procedure was very straightforward (only a couple of data that needed to be filled in on the very same page, needed to click only one more button), so I registered / approved. In other words: they do have an effective way of attracting new ‘members’, but the degree of activity of a significant portion of those members may not be very high.
What’s the difference between a round A, B or C of financing in the 2.0 world?
ANOTHER news aggregatior. Just what I needed.
I don’t think NowPublic is really in the same category as Digg or Topix. NowPublic makes no attempt at aggregating news or being a comprehensive source of information. They do a great job of getting individuals involved in reporting local news events, but I wouldn’t call them “another news aggregator” at all.
Wasn’t this really their Series B? They took 1.7M or something from Brightspark last year.
Either way, I love NowPublic and can’t wait to see them grow
Good article… Much better than Duncan….
$10 million dollar Vancouver-based company. Not bad… It’s much hard to get VC in Vancouver.
Great news for a group of quality folks. Now Public are working hard to be a firstsource for original content and not just another crosspost/re-aggregating location designed to leverage earnest users’ content.
I am a NP user (uncleweed) usually posting news on hockey and cannabis. After posting a photo of a murder scene i came across, the editor “Actual News Guy” gave me a personal call to get the backstory and gauge my ability to mentally process the scene. They also served as a great place to make content public which i didn’t want to post on my own site - and they were more able to deflect police reaction than i was.
Anyhow Vancouver is indeed home to a very happening tech scene of companies brewing a strong community ethic. Entrepreneurs want to start a business here *and* stay here because of this community vibe - plus VanBC being an all around brilliant place to live (despite the local past time of complaining about everything).
I think this is great news for the field. Can’t speak for the stats, but I’m happy to see that these guys got some funding.
For folks commenting on Topix — the portion of Topix which constitutes original, fresh content are the original comments within our forum system — while we aggregate news from 50k sources, we get over half of our traffic on the commentary, half of which is not from articles but is indeed original, mainly local, output from the communities we serve.