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.
Leonard Brody, founder of NowPublic, rejects the term "citizen journalism," which has often been applied to his business. "What [our contributors] do is not journalism. We don't call it that and never have." In spite of that, he did construct NowPublic to serve as a new kind of media site. His initial goal, he said, was, "Let's go build Reuters 2.0."
NowPublic is a site about current events, and it is powered by its users. Brody feels that, "Journalism is an art form. What we are is an army of eyes and ears." So Brody's army of contributors aren't known for creating original reporting in the way we usually think about it. "The fantasy of the 300 word post doesn't exist." Rather, his contributors perform two other functions.
First, they're an army of ants, but with cameraphones, uStream and YouTube links, and Twitter accounts. At the moment, the NowPublic contributors add, literally, alternate perspectives to typical news reports.
NowPublic "hives" allow multiple contributors to add to a story as they collect new links or create new media items.
It's in this area where the most interesting new NowPublic features are coming. Brody said that his company is working on real-time analytics capabilities, so NowPublic will be able to automatically group input from various users into hubs on developing stories. Brody says NowPublic also soon be monitoring Twitter feeds and mapping items about particular current events into the hubs (which NowPublic calls "hives"). Furthermore, the software will allow readers to talk to users on the scene (via Twitter, presumably, but perhaps more directly, via SMS or voice) and ask them questions about what's happening.
"The feedback loop is getting more intense," says Brody.
Second, the NowPublic contributors act as aggregators and editors, similar in some ways to the Digg crowd. Users, not generally beholden to any given mainstream media sites, are free to pull items from all over the Web, adding their own spin on content, putting opposing views together, and so on. They are becoming the DJs of news, and that's a valuable service. To make that function even more valuable, NowPublic recently added to its reputation and ranking system, so NowPublic readers can now more easily find and follow contributors that they relate to.
Where does this leave traditonal media, according to Brody? "Five years from now, you're going to see these live networks like NowPublic, Twitter, and CoverItLive completely supersede today's media. Traditional media will focus on analysis."
The media world has seen this transition before, and more than once. In recent memory, the newsweeklies (Time, Newsweek, etc.) found their traditional role of providing the news killed by television, and eventually the Web. But they've managed to refocus on the post-story analysis and also on the hugely expensive art of investigative journalism.
I that that it's important to not think of NowPublic as a direct replacement for traditional news, though. While the proportion of on-the-spot news media gathered by "users" that is seen by the public may surpass "professional" content, as an old-line journalist myself I prefer to think of this army of reporters as customers, not competitors. The growth of crowd-sourced news content allows those people who've made it their career to study and communicate on news topics to do more study, and more communicating.
There's likely money in this model, too. NowPublic, currently pre-revenue, will soon start selling local advertising on its service. It also has business-to-business aspiration: It will offer a white-label version of the product to existing media outlets (all content will be shared back to the NowPublic service) as well as locked-down corporate versions that could be used for people in a distributed business, like a franchise, to keep tabs on what's going on in the company.
In a quintessentially Web 2.0 case of "If it got funding, it must be worth a look," user-generated news site NowPublic hauled in $10.6 million in series A venture capital funding earlier this week, and now the blog community has pounced on it with accolades and criticism alike. NowPublic, in case you haven't checked it out yet, is a "citizen journalism" site devoted to bringing you news of the user-generated variety--all stories and accompanying photos, videos, and other multimedia are contributed by fellow NowPublic readers. Then, much like Digg, which remains the top name in "social news," the user base is invited to rank and comment on stories.
It's pretty easy to use, especially if you're familiar with Digg. The top handful of stories are displayed on the front page, and a click will get you to a longer list. An Ajax-powered widget shows you the latest in comments and submissions. You can also divide the news up into verticals (politics, culture, entertainment, what-have-you). The interface is a little clunky, but pretty well-designed. The really important factor for a site like this, however, is the content.
News aggregation, either through "crowdsourcing" the reader base or automating the story selection (a la Google News), has grown more all the more appealing in recent months as headlines of Paris Hilton's jail sentence have made the jump between Us Weekly and USA Today. It makes the "shark attack story," once the poster child for media sensationalism, look downright newsworthy--and it also means that there are plenty of disgruntled news junkies out there who are fully convinced that they'd do a better job of picking which stories are the important ones.
Crowdsourcing is trendy. The problem is that you don't know what the crowd is going to be. There are a handful of "real" stories at the top of NowPublic's ranking (a bridge collapse in California, for example), but the top photo-video hit remains "Sexy Girls Playing Beach Volleyball." Additionally, there are already stories popping up on NowPublic--and getting some high ratings--that are clearly satirical. Cute, yes, but what happens when somebody plants a fake story on a user-generated news site? We've already seen this happen with Digg; remember that story about Apple Stores charging admission? 1500 Diggs later, readers caught onto the fact that it came from an Onion clone.
Right now, if you look at the top stories on NowPublic and compare them to those on the automated Google News, there is some overlap--but some disconnect, too. A bridge collapse in northern California, which doesn't make an appearance on Google News' front page, is the top story on NowPublic. No mention is made on the Vancouver-based NowPublic of Google News' current top story--that the chief justice of the U.S. Supreme Court was hospitalized--but photographs from a nude anti-oil protest in the start-up's home city are plentiful. On the flip side, Google News' aggregator has glossed over reports of a threatening typhoon off Japan, but it's right there on NowPublic. Human filtering, it seems, has both its drawbacks and benefits. Just look at Digg: it's great for tech enthusiasts, but hasn't caught on much outside the geek community.
I'm a believer in the theory that a lot of the Internet's biggest successes owe a whole lot to luck, and that the early days of a new Web endeavor are the most crucial. It's tough to kill a site's early reputation when nothing "goes away" online, and when word gets around among the early-adopter crowd that TechCrunch's Michael Arrington has trashed a hotly anticipated new start-up, that company will have a hard time cooking up a second chance. It's the same reasoning that has made a handful of New York restauranteurs rather annoyed with the city's very vocal community of food bloggers, claiming that the epicurean WordPressers rush in and test out their establishments before all the kinks have been ironed out (newspaper restaurant reviewers typically give a few weeks' grace period) and giving the eateries prematurely bad reputations that tend to last.
Consequently, these first few weeks in the wake of the funding announcement are going to be important for the evolution of NowPublic. If curious Web users, having read about the site's new funding, click their browsers over to NowPublic and see a refreshing new take on relevant news, the site could be a real phenomenon. But if NowPublic is clogged early on with fake or satirical news, political fringe or conspiracy-theory stories, celebrity gossip, or local news that's only relevant to a narrow demographic, then it could easily become crammed into a niche from which it will be hard to escape. Yes, reputations can change--just look at how the Huffington Post went from being a "liberal Drudge Report" to a reputable news destination--but when there's a lot of hard-to-control user-generated content involved, it's not going to be easy for a company to shape and reshape is own image.
Because no matter what your business model is, putting so much control into the hands of users is always a gamble. If it works, it works great. But if it doesn't work, well, you're in quite the bind.
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