A Vancouver-based Internet company is aiming to become the world's largest news agency by leveraging the content created by regular people all over the world.
is a website based in Vancouver, started by entrepreneurs Howard Brody, Michael Meyers and Michael Tippet, in whose Vancouver garage the company was housed when it started in 2005.
Users can add text, images and audio they deem newsworthy to the website. According to NowPublic, the website is growing at a rate of 35 per cent every month and Time magazine listed NowPublic as one of the top 50 websites of 2007.
"We basically realized years ago that as more and more people were carrying camera phones and devices that would allow them to record the news around them, that pretty quickly they would become the actual reporting service that captured most of the events people cared about," NowPublic CEO Brody told CTV's Canada AM.
The company decided to position itself as an entity that collects the information much like a news agency. Illegal content is removed and a volunteer staff of editors, in addition to staff based in Vancouver and the United States, review the content and guide people who provide content to ensure that key content is included in their submissions. However, the submissions of users are not edited.
"We chose not to for one simple reason, which is we don't own the content," Brody said. "When you post the story, it's your story and we really don't have the right to edit it."
The website currently has over 120,000 reporters from 140 countries from around the world. They are not paid for their contributions.
'Contributing reporters' as Brody likes to term people who post content to the site, are instead directed by the 20 members of the company.
Brody made his dislike of the term 'citizen journalism' known, saying the people who contribute to the site are not journalists.
"Anyone can become a reporter," Brody said. "We don't call them journalists for one reason. 'Citizen journalism' is a term that the industry uses and we're not big fans of it and you'll never see it on the website. Telling someone they're going to be a journalist is they're going to like telling them they're going to be a citizen dentist. It's a long-trusted profession that requires a skill-set and frankly it's a high water mark for a lot of people to contribute."
Brody said that NowPublic allows more people to contribute to news gathering and to assist traditional mainstream news outlets in breaking stories. The company recently announced it is expanding an existing partnership with The Associated Press to include bureaus across the United States.
Despite operating outside the spheres of mainstream news, NowPublic aspires to being fair and balanced. Brody points to the self-regulation features of other websites as an example of their approach.
"If you look at other systems online, like Wikipedia and eBay, it's pretty clear right now that communities are great arbiters of truth and we've done a pretty good job in our own community in making sure that the truth gets through," Brody said. "When stuff is unfair it comes out pretty quickly"
NowPublic recently secured US$10.6 million dollars in funding from New York-based company Rho Ventures.
While Brody joked the company will be building 'a huge golden toilet' in the company office with the money, he indicated the new financial injection would be largely directed towards improving the technology powering the site and beginning to pay contributors.
