News

Entrepreneur Leonard Brody has already written about Canada's entrepreneurial giants in his best-selling books Everything I Needed to Know about Business ... I Learned from a Canadian and Innovation Nation.

Now he's trying his hand at re-writing the world of on-line journalism.

Mr. Brody, with Michael Meyers and Michael Tippett co-founded NowPublic, a participatory news network that utilizes amateur reporters around the world to cover breaking news on-line.

Advances made in digital technology allow virtually any one to take a picture or post a story to a website or blog. Increasingly, this content is finding its way on to mainstream media coverage. Entrepreneurs are flocking to this area in an attempt to tap into what is now being dubbed "citizen journalism" or "participatory journalism."

At its heart, citizen journalism allows the public to supply pictures and stories of events as they happen to readers on the Internet. The debate over whether this is journalism is a subject for another day. Suffice to say, mass media organizations are taking notice.

NowPublic has grown in the past 12 months into one of the fastest growing news organizations on the internet with over 15,000 "reporters" in 130 countries and over two million unique visits a month.

The company's bold assertion that during Hurricane Katrina they had more reporters in the affected areas than most news organizations have on their entire staff, speaks to the company's ambition to remake the face of mass media.

It seems that they aren't the only ones who believe they can do it. The market is crowded with companies such as Flikr, Scoopt, and OhmyNews to name only a few.

Korea's OhmyNews burst on the scene in 2000 and it is now seen as the model for citizen journalism. OhmyNews now employs 60 full-time journalists whose job it is to edit, fact-check and prepare the filings from its vast stable of citizen journalists around the world.

In what speaks to the belief investors have in the future of citizen journalism, NowPublic.com recently closed a $1.4-million (U.S.) financing deal. The transaction was led by Brightspark Ventures of Toronto along with several veteran angel investors including members of the New York Angels and current and former executives from Nokia, Register.com, Infospace, Microsoft, Alliance Atlantis and Warner Bros. Television.

"The company is dis-intermediating news production by directly connecting the people that consume news to ordinary people that witness extraordinary things. We are bringing the power of crowd-sourcing to reporting," said Mr. Brody.

The company will be using the financing to grow its reporter base and deliver the an on-demand reporting system to media partners.

"I've always been a fan of media, and a student of what goes on in the media business," said Mr. Brody, in an interview.

Mr. Brody sees huge growth potential for his venture. He points to the fact that only 3 per cent of the global advertising spending went on-line last year. It's sure to grow, he adds.

News gathering is no longer limited to those who possess shoulder-mounted video cameras, he notes. Today's digital technology allows witnesses to news events to record the action themselves, on a cell phone, camera or video recorder. Over the past few years this type of "reporting" has flourished to the point major news outlets will often bid for the right to publish or air footage from people at the scene.

And that's where NowPublic comes in.

"The press is heavily reliant on citizens finding content by being first on the scene," said Mr. Brody.

The NowPublic model is designed to be a collection point for images or footage taken by ordinary citizens. News outlets can bid on the rights to the image or footage, with the lion's share going to the "reporter."

Through this process, the contributors or "reporters" receive a rating based on the quality of their work. The next phase of NowPublic's business plan involves on-demand reporting, where media outlets can request coverage of an event and they are given a roster of reliable "reporters" in a given area to do the job, kind of like a global assignment desk.

According to Mr. Brody, there are many investors excited about the potential for citizen journalism, but it all remains an unproven model. To that end, Mr. Brody has heard one consistent message from his investors.

"Don't lose our money ... that's the first thing they are telling us," he said, with a laugh. "I think we all believe the same thing. All we know is that [participatory journalism] is going to be more significant in five years than it is today. That's all we really know.

"Who is best positioned to help content owners make sense of that world and to act as a real value add to them? I think that's really where we all felt that Now Public and the model we were pursuing was the way to go."