News Videos Fuel NowPublic Citizen Journalism
Citizen journalism hits the big screen, and small.
NowPublic made a “crowd powered news” splash last month when it snagged $10.6 million venture capital infusion to “enable NowPublic to further its goal of being the largest news network in the world with more people on the ground in the right places and at the right times to report the news.”
According to NowPublic, “News is new information on current events.” Sounds straight forward. But, in analyzing NowPublic’s “FrontPage” at the time of its funding announcement and during Storm Erin last week, I found that NowPublic “contributors” were not generally posting original, primary-sourced “news.” Rather, NowPublic “news” stories appeared to be predominately of the derivative blogging style ilk, “borrowed” cut and pastes of ”news” stories originally reported by paid, professional news reporting organizations and/or other blogs.
NowPublic advises prospective contributors:
The news you post should be “news in this commonly accepted sense. It will be one of three types:”
1) Original, relevant information about a current event that you have actually witnessesed, documented or reserached.
2) New information yo have collected, aranged and contextualized about a current event.
3) Commentary, advice or analysis directly related to a current event.
As NowPublic often presents news commentary, rather than actual eye witness accounts, I asked Michael Tippett (”the guy who started up this crazy thing in his garage”) to explain his claim that NowPublic mobilizes “an army of reporters to cover the events that define our world.”
Our exchage is below.
DB: You assert NowPublic is a platform for citizen journalism. Nevertheless, on August 23, NowPublic’s lead homepage “Front Page story concerning Storm Erin, a breaking weather event that ought to be tailor made for the “crowd powered media” formula Nowpublic espouses, was not a citizen eye-witness account, it was a “cut and paste” redireect to an “original story” produced by Associated Press reporting and published by the U.K.’s Guardian Unlimited.
The number two Nowpublic “best crowd powered news” story featured on the Front Page, “59 year old makes college football team,” was also a “cut and paste” from an original AP report published at a Canadian sports news Website.
Why does Nowpublic claim to mobilize an “army of reporters to cover the events that define our world” when the NowPublic Front Page “news” often presents as a Digg-like aggregation of links to original reporting done by third party organizations and published elsewhere?
TIPPETT: Our view of crowd powering the news is very broad.
With thousands of reports coming in weekly it is simply not possible to manage the inflow and determine what is good, bad or otherwise using traditional, centrally controlled strategies. The alternative to this route is to crowd source the editorial (digglike, if you will). As a result the stories on the homepage are chosen largely based on the interests of our members. These choices and areas of focus wil often coorespond to decisions made within traditional news organizations. It is no surprise that people are interested in a category 5 hurricane or a bridge collapse.
But that is only one piece of the puzzle. The story abut Storm Erin uses a highlighted item from The Guardian. Our highlight tool lets people cite other websites as the source of news material and provides links back to the source document. in this regard we are no different than other news services (a search on the NYTime’s website for “reuters” for example produces 47 thousand results). We are not purists in this regard and we have never claimed to never cite 3rd party sources as the basis for anything.Quite the contrary, we think that 3rd party sources are often a very good starting point for discussion or additonal reporting.
Where we do feature original content in the Storm Erin example is in the commentary provided in the comments section and in the footage supplied by members. Material that has come in: http://www.nowpublic.com/node/615322/footage/list
The story has material from two eye witnesses so far. These are real people, on the ground, providing original reporting. I would expect the amount of material to grow over time. I’m not suggesting that all members provide Pullitzer worthy material but they do provide a citizen perspective of the news. They are living within the news cycle and it is their story thta NowPublic strives to tell.
THANKS MICHAEL.
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Why did Rho Ventures lead a $10.6 million funding round on behalf of NowPublic? To “change the media landscape,” is the PR explanation.