The Crowdsourcerer: NowPublic

he June issue of Wired magazine coined an interesting buzzword: "crowdsourcing." It's like outsourcing, but with a large number of unpaid or low-paid amateurs.

For Mike Tippett, it forms the basis of what he wants to accomplish. NowPublic.com, the Vancouver-based news site he built on that notion, is the result. It opened for business on the Web a little more than a year ago, and is now ramping up its marketing and outreach.

"What I want to accomplish is simple," he said. "I want to build the largest news organization in the world."

So far, Tippett can claim some 30,000 reporters, who are really not more than registered contributing members working without a newsroom and on their own deadlines. They can write and post their news stories, cellphone-camera pictures or videos, or something they read on-line elsewhere (with attribution) about what they consider to be important news. One New York City woman produces professional-looking man-in-the-street interviews, and posts them on the site.
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Mike Tippett in his unfinished new digs in Vancouver: 'I want to build the largest news organization in the world.' (Ianiv Schweber/NowPublic)
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Essentially, it's a marriage of social networking and blogging, with a the shimmer of up-to-the-minute news.

Tippet throws around words such as "citizen journalism" and "democracy," saying he does not interfere with posters — no editor filters it, and nothing is taken down (unless it violates the law). What original content members post on NowPublic.com is covered by Creative Commons, a copyright licensing system developed for the digital world that allows copyright holders to set their own terms.

It's the journalism equivalent of open-source software, such as Linux, which relies on an unorganized and unpaid army of developers, each contributing to the quality of the product. It worked for software, and it's working for Wikipedia.org, so why not news?

Yet citizen journalism as it has been understood so far has an Achilles heel: Trust. The way most citizen journalism is conceived, stories are written without verification by unknown writers who carry little authority, if any. Mainstream journalists, the ones most threatened by citizen journalism, have long considered the lack of accuracy, trust, authority or reliability the weaknesses of "citizen journalism."

But citizen journalism is gaining a foothold on the Web — Sourcewatch.org lists 32 such websites — mainly because people have learned that they must develop a healthy skepticism about what they read, coupled with a mistrust of traditional media.

It's his approach to crowdsourcing, Tippett says, that citizen journalism develops its trust. NowPublic.com brings back the traditional notion of a hierarchy of news stories, but this time stories are ranked by the site's members. The more comments added to a story, he says, the greater importance it develops, and the higher up it goes on the site. Moreover, a story gains authority as more people support it, Tippett says. "It's the power of the crowd."

Many blog sites could argue the same, but what sets NowPublic.com apart is the way visitors can read the news. It can be sorted by importance — a front-page approach — or by freshness or by popularity. For instance, after I started writing this story, a small plane had crashed into a building in New York, and the Associated Press version of the story appeared on NowPublic.com minutes later. Two hours later, it was still the top story, with 475 views and two comments. Shortly after, a member called "jenblossom" posted a photo of the resulting fire, taken from her office window.

Another interesting concept Tippet has created is linkage with bloggers — people who post their own blogs on NowPublic.com will get a link back to their own blogs, where others' comments will appear automatically as they do at NowPublic.com. The effect brings new visitors to both sites, increasing traffic.

All this, Tippet hopes, will attract masses of visitors, and with them will come advertising, which will provide the revenue stream. The ad-supported site will remain free.

The public news face of the site is Mark Schneider, a 30-year veteran of traditional news (he was a CTV News reporter until a few years ago). He holds the informal-sounding title of Actual News Guy, and acts as a kind of editor-in-chief, a news adviser but without the editing functions.

Schneider credits the software with a lot of the site's success. NowPublic.com is a very slick package that automates the posting process, and offers a fresh approach to the way the stories are presented. It was created from the ground up for the site by the company's production office in Budapest — "They have some really clever coders there," Schneider says.

Tippett, 36, had been introduced to Schneider by a mutual friend, Stewart Butterfield, himself a poster-boy of social networking as co-creator of the FLICKR website. Tippet and Schneider discovered they had a lot of opinions about journalism in common, and decided to start something together. Tippett took his 15 years of experience working on large-scale websites, put it together with Schneider's news experience, and took on two New York-based partners, Michael Meyers, a Web developer, and Leonard Brody, a venture capitalist, to flesh out the idea.

Tippett's first site, posted in 2004, was called Blueherenow.com, "Citizen Reporter News," an awkward name that was dropped in November in favour of NowPublic.com The site today — bolstered by $1.4-million (U.S.) in venture-capital financing in May — garners more than three million visitors a month and is growing every day, Schneider says.

The tool that is redefining news, Tippett says, is the cellphone, which can take single photos or videos with sound with increasing quality. And since so many people own such devices, it's only natural that someone armed with one will be near a breaking-news site, and be able to post film on NowPublic.com within minutes.

NowPublic.com has just released another helpful tool — this one an "extension" to the Firefox browser, which places a button on the browser that allows the user to highlight text on the Web and post it on the site in a few easy steps. The company is preparing a version for the Internet Explorer browser.

The site now boasts about 16 full-time employees in one office in Vancouver's Gastown district and others in New York and Budapest.

With all the ambition behind the idea, it has surely occurred to Tippett that if the site succeeds, then it would be a prime candidate for some giant — Microsoft? Google? — to snap it up. After all, earlier this week Google bought YouTube for a staggering $1.65-billion (U.S.).

Tippett won't deny the notion has crossed his mind — considering the kind of appeal social-networking sites have right now, their value can inflate quickly.

But, he said, "selling is not really our goal. Our plan is to build it up and make lots of money."