NowPublic in the News, Don't call it, "Citizen Journalism"

Canadian website NowPublic.com has introduced a host of new features to the site to ‘raise the bar for trust and credibility’ for citizen journalism, a press release from the site has said.

A new ranking system for members of the ‘crowd powered news site’ has been introduced to rate members based on their contributions - including factors like page views generated, comments received and number of front page stories.

A ‘presence stream’ added to the site also shows feeds of content created by users’ on external sites like Flickr, Twitter and YouTube.

Finally a news dashboard has been created to give users control over what content and which NowPublic feeds they subscribe to.

NowPublic Rebirth: Weighted Crowdsourcing, Lifestream Updates, and More

News bookmarking and citizen journalismhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Journalism site NowPublic has relaunched its website and added a few new features. With this rebirth, NowPublichttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NowPublic is hoping to set the new standard for citizen journalism. How’s that? With a trust and credibility system. Upon launch, NowPublic did a few things that traditional media hadn’t yet done–allow more open discussions around the traditional media news (i.e. Associated Press feeds coming through NowPublic). With an increased ability to create transparency with crowdsourcing and news-sharing, NowPublic needs to further tweak its system by layering in a bit more control and filtering, if you will, of all that transparent interaction on the site.

In order to do so, NowPublic has instituted a member ranking system that lets users collect points via site participation. The more a user contributes to the global NowPublic news community, whether it be through comments, uploads and other submissions, the higher a user can be ranked. There is a bit of number crunching that goes along with point collection so some quality contribution is imposed into a weighted ranking scale.

Leonard Brody, founder of NowPublic, rejects the term "citizen journalism," which has often been applied to his business. "What [our contributors] do is not journalism. We don't call it that and never have." In spite of that, he did construct NowPublic to serve as a new kind of media site. His initial goal, he said, was, "Let's go build Reuters 2.0."

NowPublic is a site about current events, and it is powered by its users. Brody feels that, "Journalism is an art form. What we are is an army of eyes and ears." So Brody's army of contributors aren't known for creating original reporting in the way we usually think about it. "The fantasy of the 300 word post doesn't exist." Rather, his contributors perform two other functions.

First, they're an army of ants, but with cameraphones, uStream and YouTube links, and Twitter accounts. At the moment, the NowPublic contributors add, literally, alternate perspectives to typical news reports.

It's in this area where the most interesting new NowPublic features are coming. Brody said that his company is working on real-time analytics capabilities, so NowPublic will be able to automatically group input from various users into hubs on developing stories. Brody says NowPublic also soon be monitoring Twitter feeds and mapping items about particular current events into the hubs (which NowPublic calls "hives"). Furthermore, the software will allow readers to talk to users on the scene (via Twitter, presumably, but perhaps more directly, via SMS or voice) and ask them questions about what's happening.

"The feedback loop is getting more intense," says Brody.

These are concerns that NowPublic.com - a Vancouver-based site that encourages both original content and links to stories on other news websites - is trying to grapple with.

The site was recently redesigned with added tools for visitors to assess content, such as a rating system to rank the credibility of contributors.

But the website's founder, Michael Tippett, says objectivity is less important than ensuring readers have access to as many points of view as possible.

"(Just as) you come to respect a journalist who writes for a news organization because you recognize that news organization itself has credibility, you can look at the NowPublic members the same way," says Tippett.

"It's not necessary that one person is completely dispassionate about a subject. ... We believe that if you have a number of different points of view represented in a story, that the truth will emerge."

Any one who has been awake for the past few years has seen the rise of user generated content in how it has been used in all kinds of different forms. Today one of the most interesting uses I have seen so far with Now Public that is crowd powered news source. People from all over the world can submit stories, photos, videos and audio whey the user thinks is news and the site defines as "new information on current events". Once the content is posted it is policed by the site and members for bad content but good content is rewarded so the best stories rise to the top of searched and listings. You can find what you are looking for by searching or explore one of the site's channels which are local, world, culture, environment, tech, health, style, sports and strange categories. you can see it is still getting it's legs but in a day and age when CNN seems to be more concerned about writing headlines that will look good on t-shirts why couldn't this take off and give the big guys a run for their money.

NowPublic is one of a group of crowd-sourcing media sites thave have cropped up in recent years. Newsvine, Current, CNN’s iReport and and South Korea-based OhMyNews are others that crowd-source links to news, or let authors write or shoot video of actual original articles. News giant Gannett also jumped in the fray in late 2006. Early on, NowPublic was noted for being one of the few sites to publish AP articles and allow people to discuss them. NowPublic however, doesn’t consider itself a “citizen journalism” service, its founder tells CNet. Instead it’s a brigade of “eyes and ears.”

Some of the others in this area are not shy about calling their services news. CNN’s iReport is taglined “Unfiltered. Unedited. News” and Current says, “You Make The News… We Put It On Television.”

Recently NowPublic released a number of new features, including a points-based ranking system to increase credibility for trusted users of the site; a FriendFeed-like news stream of people’s YouTube, Flickr and Twitter activity that can act as a kind of person’s personal news service; and a personal dashboard of news, photos and videos from whereever people want to receive news.