The last company to present yesterday at TechCrunch50 was picked by the audience from the more than 100 additional companies vying for attention in our DemoPit. Every attendee got three TC50 poker chips that they could give to a DemoPit company each day, and the one with the most chips at the end of the conference became our 52nd finalist. This year’s winner was Iamnews, a crowdsourced newsroom with ambitions to one day take on AP and Reuters.
Iamnews is a news assignment hub for blogs and news Websites. It is a tool for crowdsourcing news. A blog or any Web publisher can use it to solicit submissions from citizen journalists—videos, photos, links, Twitters, notes, or full articles The Web publisher then takes all the submissions and pulls together the best ones to create a post or article..
Israeli founder Nir Ofir, who is also the founder of Blog.tv, explained:
The problem is most small to medium publishers do not have the resources to tap copyrighted news and photos. We allow publishers to create news assignments, invite reporters to come in and collaborate in the creation of news. You can invite your own reporters, or we can match you with reporters.
So a blog that wants to cover an event like next year’s TC50, for instance, could put out an assignment and solicit reports, photos, and videos from other bloggers at the conference and attendees themselves. Crowdsourced journalism just took a step forward. The site is still in private alpha, but we will have invites soon.
Click here to watch a video of iamnews’ presentation.
Expert Panelists
Loic Le Meur: Who are you targeting?
Nir Ofir: Bloggers and small publishers that do not have the resources to create news. They don’t have news teams so we want to create news teams for them .
Don Dodge: Who gets paid and how?
Ofir: What we are planning to create is a market layer, collect all the footage and news created this way and distribute it to other media brands, and allow other contributors to make some revenue. Today’s media brands are buying news from AP and Reuters. What we want is for them to buy news from us.
Jeff Weiner: When you got the assignment desk component it looked pretty interesting. Is there any element to what you are doing that will allow you to get critical mass faster than other content exchanges out there?
Ofir.: We don’t want to be a destination site. But by creating partnerships with destination sites we hope to create a bigger network, because they are the brands and the editors.
Weiner: Will you be assigning reputation value to the individual contributors?
Ofir: Exactly. We are planning to create some kind of an eBay feedback mechanism so you as a publisher can decide this is someonethat I can trust, this is someone I can buy news from him.
Sean Parker: Will the readers be able to say there was a factual error in this?
Ofir: We are supplying the Publisher the tools from the creation of the article until it is published. So I guess we are not supplying this kind of solution.
Who voted for this? Lets see a show of hands.
Achieving scale and meaningful monetization are going to be problematic, IMHO.
Good job to iamnews! Crowdsourcing news content is a great way to go. We love this niche.
In fact, our news publishing system has allowed news publishers to let their users submit news content (articles, images, video, audio, and other files) for approval on our http://www.Solupress.com system for about two years now. We also offer publishers free sites at http://www.FreeNewsWebsite.com.
My hand is up.
I think this is a great idea that will further evolve the credibility and marketability of the citizen journalist and blogging worlds. However, the market is full of a lot of competition (as we know, because we’re in the market with many CJ sites), so you have to be fast to get to market. The publishing tools sound great with Iamnews, and no doubt it will be popular with publishers but how do you attract contributors? The real challenge is developing and holding a contributor base and the monetization strategy is important I think. Revenue for users is something we’ve always believed in, and that’s why we’ve been paying citizen journalists for two years now.
We wish Iamnews all the best, and hopefully their tools help raise the benchmark standard for the whole industry. We’re always a fan of a site that can lend credibility and weight to a very credible (and oft criticized) area of new media.
- Chris Hogg, from the citizen journalist news network at http://www.DigitalJournal.com
congrats Nir!
At the first glance it seems to be a very good idea.
But
Aren’t the blogs specific comments and thoughts about the news in general? What I mean is that we do already talk about the news in our blogs everyday and we add our interpretation to the news, and we just relay to the original source with a link or a trackback.
So why shall I pay for some content that I can link for free?
(If Mrs. Ofir can contact Mr.Ofir to explain that to me, maybe I have not understood the concept)
I swear, when I first read the article title here my first reaction was a Web 2.0 spelling for “Lame-news”
Sounds like a good idea. I signed up to be notified when it’s open to the public. On first try, got a page full of .NET error messages (looks like they’re running that). Tried again and it worked. Writing this not to complain but so that they can check and fix the problem – since others might not try a second time like I did. Also, to be more user-friendly, they should trap that system error message and replace it with a more user-friendly one – otherwise, it’ll again turn off non-technical users. Ease of use is one of the biggest needs for a killer app in software – and conversely, the lack of it is the biggest app killer – if you get what I mean
John Gage, senior research honcho at Sun (Google him – he was a Sun founder, is at Kleiner Perkins now), said ease of use is paramoumt, in an interview, years ago, and it still holds true …
- Vasudev
congratulation, nir.
Congrats Nir! Iamsohappy4.u
myfavz.com could be of interest to you. It is a new startup launched on sept 8th at the tc50 demopit. It is a social shopping portal with a unique patent pending feature called pKaboo!
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Let me know your views on myfavz
AJ
Founder / CEO
http://www.myfavz.com