Hyper-local publishing company Examiner.com is set to launch its service in five Canadian cities.
According to the organization, Examiner will now provide localized content to those living in Calgary, Montreal, Ottawa, Toronto, and Vancouver. The company will also offer national content for all those not living in the five cities.
Examiner is growing up quickly since its launch in April 2008. Examiner now provides localized content in 162 U.S. cities, according to a company spokesperson. It plans to add 40 more markets in the coming months. With the expansion to Canada now under way, the spokesperson told me in a phone conversation on Wednesday that the company plans to bring its service to the U.K. and Australia by the first quarter of 2010.
Examiner's foray into the Canadian market follows its strategy in the U.S. market, the spokesperson said. When it launched in the U.S., only five cities were covered. Today, local "examiners" are posting more than 15,000 stories per week.
Examiner is currently looking for Canadians who are "passionate about their interests and areas of expertise" to join one of the markets' local sites. When Examiner chooses a writer, they provide training on how to write articles. All writers are paid based on performance and other metrics.
Citizen news site NowPublic has been sold to another company in the "hyperlocal" space, Examiner.com, the two companies announced Tuesday.
The two sites will operate independently, but Examiner will integrate NowPublic's technology into its site and will encourage NowPublic's contributors to also write for Examiner--right now, the buyer says it has grown 200 percent since the beginning of the year (it launched in April 2008) and has 15,000 active contributors, hoping to hit 30,000 by year's end.
NowPublic's executives, including CEO Leonard Brody, will join the management team of Clarity Digital Group, parent company of Examiner.
"Every day, we hear discussions about whether hyperlocal content will ever be scalable, sustainable, or profitable as a business entity," Examiner CEO Rick Blair said in a release. "With the acquisition of NowPublic, we have the technology to further engage our community of more than 17 million unique visitors per month, and distribute our stories in new and innovative ways."
Was this a bargain-basement acquisition? The companies did not disclose financial terms. But an insider in the space told CNET News that NowPublic had been shopping itself to some pretty big media companies for some time at a higher price than potential buyers were willing to pay. The company had raised about $12 million in venture funding.
Many media companies have simply been launching their own "citizen journalism" initiatives, like CNN's iReport and blogging experiments from newspapers like the Washington Post, which could make an exit tougher for the smaller players.
Digital-media companies like AOL and InterActiveCorp have also made plays to dominate the local-news market--AOL recently acquired local-focused start-ups Patch and Going, the former of which was already a personal investment on behalf of CEO Tim Armstrong, and the Barry Diller-run IAC has been placing a big emphasis on business directory Citysearch.
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