Aug 1st, 2007 | Citizen Media, Media 2.0 | 1 Comment
Update (Aug. 3):
Leonard Brody of NowPublic posted a response to Jay’s note on Facebook saying: “Jay, thanks so much for this…great analysis. We really would love to have you as an advisor to the company. Interested?”
Original post:
Given that New York University professor Jay Rosen’s NewAssignment.net is at the forefront of “citizen journalism” (or “crowdsourced” journalism or “networked” journalism, or whatever you choose to call it) it’s probably not surprising that he has some thoughts on the recent announcement by Vancouver-based NowPublic that it has landed $10.6-million in venture funding and is also expanding its relationship with the Associated Press — all of which I wrote about in a Globe and Mail news story and a blog post.
Jay recently wrote a Facebook note about the deal, in which he said that he sees great potential for NowPublic to evolve from what it is now into a true “networked journalism” site with full-fledged news reports as well as photos and videos — but he says that doing so will likely take more co-ordination and editorial oversight than the site is currently doing (at the moment NowPublic has no staff editors, although it does have former CTV reporter Mark Schneider overseeing things).
Jay has been through his own experiment with networked journalism in the Assignment Zero project, which was a co-venture with Wired magazine writer Jeff “Crowdsourcing” Howe and a host of others (more on that in this post by Jeff and a follow-up here) and is currently engaged in another with HuffingtonPost.com — a political reporting effort called OffTheBus. Jay did an interview about Assignment Zero here.
After I read his note, I asked Jay whether I could excerpt some of his thoughts here (for you non-Facebook types), and he graciously agreed. One of the points he made is that NowPublic has so far been “most effective as a spot photo site.” Its distribution deal with AP, he says:
“Was mostly for the network of photographers who can get to sudden news events (like the proverbial plane crash in a cornfield) more quickly than AP could dispatch one of its pros…
This is the continued unfolding of a sudden realization that struck with the Indian Ocean Tsunami in 2004, and again with the London train bombings, two events that put “user generated content” on the map of the world’s news.”
Jay quotes a comment from Reuters CEO Tom Glocer about the tsunami, in which he said that the news agency had 2,300 journalists and 1,000 stringers around the world but none near the site, “so for the first 24 hours the best and the only photos and video came from tourists armed with 1.3 megapixel portable telephones, digital cameras and camcorders. And if you didn’t have those pictures you weren’t on the story.”
But so far, Jay says, NowPublic hasn’t really done much in terms of organizing an editorial team that can be mobilized for such events, perhaps in part because the site is hoping people will spontaneously organize themselves.
“There’s a tendency to think that citizen journalism will happen by itself if you build a good platform and let the community emerge because a) it sometimes happens, usually around crisis events, and b) if it did arise ‘naturally’ the elusive dream of radically reduced labor costs might be around the corner, and c) it’s appealingly bottom-up logic to say: give people the tools and get out of the way.”
Rosen says that if NowPublic is going to go beyond just supplying photos or videos and the occasional eyewitness report, it will take a change in focus.
“It will have to decide that it’s a content (editorial) company with an open participation platform. And then it will have to figure out how to make its contributors into an editorial community, or news-breaking social network. Head down this path and pretty soon you’re needing editors.”
And not just editors but editors who can do some hand-holding and outreach, as Jeff points out here. In the end, Jay says that NowPublic is “something of a sleeping athlete, ready to compete in the worlds when it wakes up.”
I think there’s some truth to that — and that the company’s expanded arrangement with Associated Press gives NowPublic an incredible platform for distributing what its members produce to traditional media. It’s like the world’s largest network of “stringers,” as newspapers and other media outlets call them. That could be an amazing resource.
Jul 30th, 2007 | Citizen Media, Media 2.0 | No Comments
Scott Karp of Publishing 2.0 writes about the NowPublic financing and takes issue with the terms “citizen journalism” (which I admit is a terrible term) and “crowdsourcing” (which I actually kind of like). He says that what is going on at NowPublic is just journalism, period — or perhaps “networked journalism,” which Jeff Jarvis suggested as an alternative here.
Update:
My mesh friend Jeff Howe — who coined the term “crowdsourcing” — has a post in response to Scott’s, in which he effectively agrees that it’s really just journalism, extended to new sources.
Jul 30th, 2007 | Citizen Media, Media 2.0 | 3 Comments
I wanted to take a more in-depth look at some of the things that NowPublic.com CEO Leonard Brody said about the local “citizen journalism” model during our interview about NowPublic’s financing and the failure of Backfence, which I posted about here. He said some similar things to Liz Gannes, who also spoke to him about the NowPublic deal for GigaOm.
In talking about Backfence and its “hyper-local” model, Brody said that as far as he is concerned hyper-local doesn’t work as an online model for younger readers:
“For people 35 and under, hyper-local doesn’t mean anything any more,” he said. “Local weather, news and that kind of thing is a commodity, and there’s lots of places you can get it.
We’ve moved from that to hyper-personal news… younger users check their Facebook feed way more times a day than they check CNN.”
Is that why Backfence didn’t work? And why do sites like Baristanet.com continue to prosper? Co-founder Mark Potts takes a look at the failure of Backfence and the lessons that can be learned here. And check the comments at PaidContent for some other thoughts, from Joe Duck and K. Paul Mallasch among others (K. Paul has his own local site, MuncieFreePress.com)
Brody did say during our interview, however, that hyper-local might make sense for print publications as a business model. And Howard Owens looks more at that side of the equation, and says that hyper-local isn’t really about weather or politics — it’s about people. Whether local newspapers can execute a strategy based on that remains to be seen.
One way to do that is to buy hyper-local citizen journalism efforts, which is what McClatchy did when it bought FresnoFamous, and what Fisher Communications recently did with Pegasus News. And for a great in-depth look at Gannett Newspapers’ makeover and its experiments with hyper-local and citizen journalism, check out Jeff “Crowdsourcing” Howe’s recent piece in Wired.
Update:
When it comes to local journalism, Jeff Jarvis says that he agrees with Rafat Ali of PaidContent, who argues that what Brody means by local doesn’t work is that “local is hard as hell.”
Jul 30th, 2007 | Media 2.0, Social Media | 1 Comment
NowPublic.com — the “citizen journalism” site based in Vancouver — has turned down takeover bids from two major media entities (both based outside of North America) and closed a $10.6-million financing round with a series of U.S. and Canadian venture funds. I wrote a news story about it for the Globe and Mail
Update: TechCrunch has the news about the financing (but not the acquisition offers), and there is also some coverage at VentureBeat and at GigaOm, where Liz Gannes also talked to Leonard Brody.
It’s one of the larger — and possibly the largest — Series A financings of any citizen journalism site (OhMyNews.com of South Korea did an $11-million led by Softbank at one point, but that was a Series B financing). The round was led by Rho Ventures out of New York, along with previous seed investors Brightspark and Growthworks out of Toronto. NowPublic said that after a road show with about 20 venture funds, it wound up with nine term sheets or expressions of financing interest.
The deal is a major vote of confidence not just in NowPublic, but in the idea of “crowdsourced” journalism or “citizen reporters,” and stands in sharp contrast to the recent closure of Backfence.com, a high-profile citizen-journalism project that had half a dozen local sites.
I talked on Friday with CEO Leonard Brody, who co-founded the company two years ago with Michael Tippett and Michael Meyers, and he said NowPublic is now the largest citizen reporting venture in the world, with more than 100,000 members in 140 countries and 3,800 cities.
Brody said that the company considered the acquisition offers, but “made decision that we felt we could grow this thing” and that it was just too early to sell. The NowPublic CEO said the company is focused on its plan to “build the largest news agency in the world” and that he is convinced they are building what will become “a billion-dollar company.”
NowPublic has 20 staff employees in all, with offices in Vancouver and New York and several employees each in Germany, Hungary and Slovenia. Unlike OhMyNews.com, which has about 50,000 members, NowPublic does not have any professional editors on staff, although a former CTV reporter plays the role of “Actual News Guy” in helping select stories.
NowPublic has also expanded its previous content-sharing deal with Associated Press. Under the original arrangement, AP’s foreign bureaus could have access to NowPublic photos and news reports, and Brody said that relationship has been expanded to include the wire service’s U.S. bureaus.
Brody said the money would be used to expand operations, beef up NowPublic’s technology — including adding more mobile features such as automatic GPS geo-location — and that the company is also looking at compensating members who submit eyewitness news reports, photos and video.
Compensating members of a “crowdsourcing” effort such as NowPublic or even a video-sharing site such as YouTube has been a major source of debate over the past year or so. While Brody said he doesn’t think most members submitting things to the site are motivated primarily by money, NowPublic is thinking about ways of compensating them, monetary and otherwise.
Some NowPublic members have already done deals with AP as a result of items they submitted to the site: a member from Oman who posted photos of a storm later sold his shots to Associated Press and they were used by Yahoo News, Forbes magazine and several other breaking news sites.
Of the Backfence.com closure, Brody said it was “a sad day for citizen journalism — they were pioneers.” But he said that NowPublic has a much different model from Backfence, which focused on “hyper-local” reporting, while the Vancouver site is targeting a global market. Interestingly, Brody said he didn’t see hyper-local journalism as a very good business model, at least not for younger Web users.
“For people 35 and under, hyper-local doesn’t mean anything any more,” he said. “Local weather, news and that kind of thing is a commodity, and there’s lots of places you can get it. We’ve moved from that to hyper-personal news… younger users check their Facebook feed way more times a day than they check CNN.”
Congratulations to the team at NowPublic on closing the deal. It will be interesting to see what kinds of uses they can put that $10.6-million to over the next year or so.
Feb 9th, 2007 | Media 2.0 | 3 Comments
Some pretty big developments at Vancouver-based NowPublic, the “citizen journalism” or “participatory media” site, or whatever your preferred term is. One of them is that PaidContent says the company, whose site just underwent a redesign and relaunch, has signed a partnership arrangement with the Associated Press newswire. The two are going to collaborate on news coverage, although there aren’t really a whole lot of details — either in the PaidContent item or in the news release from the wire service.
AP vice-president Jim Kennedy says AP “has a long tradition of pursuing citizen contributions in breaking news events worldwide” and “this relationship will make that connection even stronger and result in more news and images from people who are in the right place at the right time.” Interestingly enough, NowPublic’s “Actual News Guy” Mark Schneider says in a comment on the PaidContent story that the company is looking for a correspondent in Second Life.
The other development came yesterday, and it is that MSNBC founder and former editor-in-chief Merrill Brown has joined NowPublic as chairman of the board. The release says that he “was on the front lines at MSNBC when the Internet transitioned into the number one place to consume news and content,” and that he will “help us to continue building the next-generation wire service.”
Big moves for NowPublic — it will be interesting to see how it develops.
