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.
Erik Sundelof, an engineer who oversaw the building of the AllVoices platform, chats with Amra Tareen, founder of the citizen media site.
(Credit: Hanna Sistek/CNET News)Citizen media start-up AllVoices, a global community that lets users contribute news and commentary by cell phone or online, moves from beta to the public newsroom on Thursday.
"My goal is to create the first true people's media company, where 6 billion people on the planet can share their news from wherever they are," said Amra Tareen, founder of San Francisco-based AllVoices.
The overshadowing feature on the AllVoices site is a world map that shows red, clickable dots on the location of an "event," as AllVoices calls a news report. The map allows users to see what's going on, for instance, in a particular region, country, or city. Visitors can also search for news by type: politics, business, conflict and tragedy, science and technology, sports, and entertainment.
And they can search on people. Clicking on a person's name yields a short biography of him or her, a link to a Wikipedia entry, and related content on the Web, such as articles, blog posts, videos, photos, and public comments. Users can share news, images, videos, and opinions from their cell phone via SMS or MMS, or go to the Web site itself.
AllVoices ranks news events based on the activity they are generating on the Web at large.
Tareen said AllVoices' technological platform is based on a set of patent-pending algorithms and utilizes more than 3,500 mainstream feeds in English. As a comparison, Google News includes articles from more than 10,000 news sources in 20 languages; 4,500 of those sources are in English.
In launching, AllVoices joins other competitors such as 3-year-old Associated Content, Vancouver-based NowPublic, and Harvard-founded GlobalVoices.
AllVoices is a global community that lets users contribute news, videos, images, and opinions tied to news events and people. It calls itself the first true people's media.
But AllVoices differs in some ways. When clicking on a story in Google News, the aggregator will direct you to the original source. In AllVoices, users can read the initial 250 characters of the piece before having to click through, plus all the related content.
Another feature in AllVoices is the "filter by news source," which allows readers to view stories from the news media in a specific country, neighboring countries, or region, or get a global news perspective.
Founder Tareen is a 39-year-old former venture capitalist at Sevin Rosen Funds, where she invested in IT and telecom. She holds an undergraduate degree in electronics and computer science engineering from the University of New South Wales in Australia, and an MBA from Harvard.
She incorporated the company in April 2007 and raised $4.5 million in a series A round of funding from VantagePoint Venture Partners.
Tareen got the idea for AllVoices when she traveled to Pakistan to volunteer after a massive earthquake rocked the country in 2005. She wanted to share her impressions of the devastation and lacked a platform.
Besides, being a native of Pakistan, Tareen was startled by some people's perception of the United States, where she has lived for 10 years. "They thought that the U.S was against the entire Muslim world," she said.
On her AllVoices profile page, Tareen describes herself as "a mom who is concerned about the world and wants to get the people in the world to talk to each other to resolve issues."
As we wrote on Monday, CNN's citizen journalism pet project iReport was due to get a site of its own. Today the service finally went live as iReport.com, and is already filling up with user content both old and new.
iReport's site has a lot in common with YouTube, showing off a grouping editor-selected videos (and photos) on the top of the page alongside a queue of the latest news content that's been uploaded by users. Each iReport user gets their own page with a listing of their uploaded photos and videos. Similar to Current, content is marked to show if it's been featured on CNN's televised or Web news reporting. adding incentive for others to click on it.
In addition to hosting any news story videos uploaded by users, iReport dishes out assignments to fledgling videographers and photo journalists. On top of the list is the 2008 Presidential elections, alongside weather reports, the ever popular "offbeat images", as well as "stories from Second Life," Linden Lab's MMORPG. Users can upload up to 10 videos and videos at a time, with each one taking up to 100MB in size.
Interestingly enough, the videos on iReport.com cannot be embedded on third party sites, although there are links to share it on five major social bookmarking and news services. Users also have the option of making the file downloadable, letting others grab it to play on their PCs or portable media devices. Syndication (albeit direct) is the name of the game.
In the future the service plans to increase the ties between stories, as well as where users are reporting from by integrating world maps. Already there is a "more on this story" feature that groups together content by assignment. The service also employs tags and a "newsiest" feature which "combines freshness, popularity, activity, and ratings" in an algorithm not unlike the ones found on social news sites like Digg and Reddit.
More screenshots after the break.
CNN's iReport site features playable Web videos and pictures submitted by users. Media that has been chosen to show up on CNN.com or CNN TV programming gets its own 'On CNN' badge seen in the top left of the player.
(Credit: CNET Networks)
CNN is close to expanding its "iReport" user-generated reporting initiative into a separate Web site, MediaWeek wrote Monday.
The new site, to be hosted at iReport.com, will be a repository for user-submitted news content--video, audio, and photos. Visitors can navigate through categories of news (like sports, weather, and politics), rate content, and embed it elsewhere on the Web. Contributors will be able to create profiles, and regulars can build up individual followings. As for filtering, the new site will be moderated once content has already been posted to the site; this is a change from CNN's current strategy with iReport, in which only select contributions are posted to CNN's Web site. This obviously means that the news runs the risk of inaccuracies and pranksters, but one could assume that moderation as well as community interaction could keep the fake-news factor to a minimum.
Right now, hubs for "citizen journalism" on the Web include well-backed companies like Current Media, which recently filed for an IPO, as well as start-ups of varying size like NowPublic and GroundReport.
CNN first launched the iReport project in August 2006, and since then has received over 100,000 photo and video submissions, according to MediaWeek. In October, the Time Warner-owned news brand established a presence for the initiative in virtual world Second Life.
Normally we don't report acquisition news, but this one is pretty interesting. MSNBC has scooped up social news service Newsvine for an undisclosed amount. Both services are based out of Seattle and have been in talks for the last five months. Newsvine will continue to operate independently and serve up a mix of professionally produced and user-generated content, remaining a separate brand and entity from MSNBC.com. But content from Newsvine users could be making its way onto MSNBC.com in the near future.
This is a really solid deal for both parties. Newsvine and its users get a potentially larger audience with original stories being promoted to MSNBC's front page, and, at the same time, MSNBC gets a hotbed of writing and content from a fervent Newsvine user base. In its announcement, the company also quietly noted that the service would actually be better due to the hosting improvements provided by MSNBC compared to their currently "cost-conscious" setup.
Newsvine users shouldn't be too worried about listing the "indie" feeling of Newsvine though, contributing newsmakers to the service will actually have a potentially larger audience than before considering MSNBC.com pulls in a staggering 29 million unique visitors a month.
The acquisition of Newsvine marks one of the latest buy-outs of a social news service since Reddit in late 2006. While other corporate "answers" to popular social news services like Digg and Slashdot seemingly flounder (like Propeller.com, formerly of Netscape.com ilk), Newsvine is a different breed. Instead of submitting links and having a hundred or so characters to write out their opus, Newsvine is centered toward citizen journalism, and rewards its users with revenue sharing and story promotion that is bound to go up with this potentially larger audience.
For more, see the story on CNET News.com
Topix, a news aggregation service that's been around for several years, launched a new site today, at Topix.com (previously the site was Topix.net). The service continues to pull local news from a variety of local sources, but with today's release, citizen editors can have a much stronger hand in the site.
Topix is attractive and easy to use.
(Credit: CNET Networks)On the new Topix.com, users apply for the job of editor for a topic or a community and once approved (as with Citizendium, it's not automatic), they can add stories, move stories around on the page, and remove the stories that the Topix "roboblogger" has added (the roboblogger does the necessary service of keeping alive pages that have no editors, or lazy ones). Designated editors also can write their own stories for a topic, and even submit them from a mobile phone.
Noneditors can comment on stories and submit them to a topic's editors for later inclusion. In this way it's more like USA Today than Digg, and I think users will appreciate the resulting editorial oversight. (USA Today's parent company is an investor in Topix, by the way.)
Topix editors can select, promote, or create local stories.
(Credit: CNET Networks)All these details don't really capture the essence of Topix. It's a local news site that gets it right. The service is well-designed and what it does is obvious from the start. The home page and news pages are extremely clear. But rich community and very detailed editing functions (including a Wikipedia-like revision tracker) are close at hand should you want to check them out. My only complaint with Topix is that the community isn't granular enough. There's an active Topix community on San Francisco, for example, but there's no clear way to drill into just the news and talk about my neighborhood. (Related: StreetAdvisor.)
Still, I like Topix a great deal. Of the many citizen journalism sites out there, I think this one does a better job than most at getting the balance right between editorially driven and automated news, and between simplicity and richness. It looks like a very useful site for people in a community and for those thinking about moving into one.
See News.com story. Also: Topix CEO Rich Skrenta's blog post about the re-launch.
News organization Reuters is working with photo editing powerhouse Adobe and camera maker Canon so changes to digital photos can be detected,
Reuters, the news agency whose image was tarnished earlier this year when a freelance photographer provided
"I am pleased to announce today that we are working with Adobe and Canon to create a solution that enables photo editors to view an audit trail of changes to a digital image, which is permanently embedded in the photograph, ensuring the accuracy of the image," Glocer said in the blog posting, a transcript of a December 11 speech at the Globes Media Conference in Tel Aviv.
"We sought a technical solution so that we had total and full transparency of our work. It's what we stand for. It's what we've always stood for. And we hope that it will provide reassurance to editors and consumers of our services," he said. "Transparency and truth are important to us."
The issue of trust is increasingly important in a "citizen journalism" world where the ordinary public, not just news professionals, supply content, he said.
"What does the future look like in a world in which the consumer has taken over the printing press, the dark room, the television studio? What does the result of a mashup of professional and "amateur" actually look like? And more importantly--is trust the victim in a world of millions of news sources--will we live in a world where truth is passed through a sieve of opinion and commentary?"
It's not an academic issue for Reuters. Earlier in December, it announced a deal with Yahoo in which people who post photos to the Flickr photo-sharing site, can tag their shots and submit them to Reuters.
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