How I Started NowPublic: Michael Tippett Tells Some

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by Elecia Chrunik for www.thevancouverobserver.com 

NowPublic’s “crowd powered media” format takes the bold step of asking consumers of news to also be responsible for its content. An eBay-style ranking system and a “fairly sizable” $10.6 million venture funding boost are endowing this citizen journalism site with a new level of reliability and credibility that has yet to be seen in the burgeoning realm of online and consumer-driven news.

Co-founder Michael Tippett spoke to The Vancouver Observer in a telephone interview and offered
his thoughts on why the site has garnered more than 130,000 members in
over 4000 cities and why he thinks people can trust it.

(The following is an edited version of the interview)

On the inspiration behind NowPublic:

I’ve always been interested in the news, and the impact that news has on people’s lives, and how they make decisions and think about the world.

I became interested in camera phones and how they were going to change news production and news gathering.

I thought that there was going to be a technological shift in the way information was collected, organized and distributed, and there was going to be a real need for someone to make sense of this and present it in a way that people were used to and were familiar with – their news view of the world.

And I’d been struggling with this idea for two and a half to three years.

In the process, I’ve aquired two other partners, Michael Myers and Leonard Brody. The three of us, in the last year and a half, have been able to turn this into a real success story.

We were able to raise some venture capital locally a year and a half ago ,and just recently we were able to raise a fairly sizable investment from a group of investors out of Montreal, Toronto, Vancouver and New York.

It was about ten and a half million bucks, which is probably one of the largest investments in citizen journalism anywhere in the world to date.

So it’s a real affirmation that the crazy ideas that started in my garage two and a half years ago were not so crazy.

On why NowPublic is so successful:

It’s largely generational. Timing has been good and we’ve capitalized on widespread changes in news consumption patterns.

I’m on the old side of our demographic and I sit on the cusp between my parents’ age group and people who are younger than me. Typically people
who are younger than me don’t read newspapers, don’t have an affinity with the major brands. They probably spend more time on Facebook than reading the Vancouver Sun.

There’s a different way of interacting with the world and I think that people are ready to look at alternatives in terms of Internet news that embrace this idea of participating in creating the story and that you can tell things from your perspective.

I think that there’s been a desire for people to get out and have some affect on the kinds of news that’s being created. And we were just there at the right time and I think we’ve been able to do it better than anyone else.

There’s been a lot of mistrust in the media. What’s happening in the Middle East right now has caused a lot of people to ask, “How did we get into this mess?” and “What role did the media play?”

There’re a lot of questions that are being asked about the viability and effectiveness of
traditional media institutions. I think that readers and contributors, are looking for an alternative.

On problems with libel issues:

Our position is that we are a platform, very much like an ISP [internet service provider]. We ask all of our users to sign a user agreement in which they agree to behave themselves and not publish anything nasty or illegal and if they do, we take it down.

We don’t police the site, but have a sort of have an eBay perspective on things [a reputation ranking system]. We let the community self-police. But we haven’t had a problem to date. We’re reluctant to take things down.

On how the new money will be spent:

We’ll continue to grow the user and contributor base. To reach more users we’ll get out there and market, spread the word.

Then build up the technology and make better tools for people to access the system more remotely and do more things with camera phones. And tying the website to mobile devices so you can stream messages into the system and get message to phones from the system.

We are also building up and supporting our partners. We have a relationship with AP [Associated Press] right now which is the largest news organization in the world. We’ll be building up tools to help support that relationship right now as well as to build others.

We want to have lots of AP relationships because part of our business model is to reward contributions from our members. If the stories are newsworthy in the
mainstream kind of way and have real value to something like the AP then we can give something to the contributors and take a small percentage for ourselves.

On advertising on NowPublic:

We don’t take advertising yet, but we plan to at some stage. We’re venture-backed at this stage so there’s no great urgency to start bringing in revenue. But we will be needing to at some point in the
near future.

We’re going to make sure that we do that properly and that we don’t upset the ecosystem of the site. And whenever appropriate we’re providing our contributors with an opportunity to make money as well because we recognize that their contributions are key to our success. We want to make sure that whatever the advertising decisions are that they account for that contribution.

On NowPublic’s greatest success:

I still go back to what we did during Hurricane Katrina as something that I’m really proud of and that hopefully made a difference. We had about two thousand members reporting from various places.

They started using the site as a missing persons board and it was very much like what happened after 9/11 where you had these forums full of people who had gone missing. In some cases we had people who were able to find missing loved ones and reconnect.

It wasn’t the biggest
commercial success but it was a really interesting example of how if you give people the tools, they’ll use those tools to personalize the news and improve their lives.

On criticism that NowPublic is not as credible as mainstream media:

We’re sort of in a period right now where there are a lot of vested interests who would like to see citizen media fail. So my first question is always: “Do you have a dog in that fight?”

Many of the criticisms come from people whose work we’re challenging.

To address the substantive issue, I think that it’s very much the same way eBay works – you can buy a Ferrari from some guy in San Diego, 2000 miles away, and the reason you can do that is because he’s established a reputation on the site as someone who’s trustworthy. You know he’s probably got that car and he’s probably going to deliver it to you.

I think that there are definitely mechanisms in place that let people determine what’s plausible and believable and trustworthy. They’ve been demonstrated in other forms, so I don’t see why if you can buy a
Ferrari, why you can’t buy someone’s headline.