Here's the site: NowPublic, or Crowd Powered Media. It boasts almost 120,000 members in almost 4,000 cities. I did some clicking around, you can select rss feeds by location and there are several categories. It looks like they have some very good ideas, based upon their statements, anyway. See Places for instance - for now the problem looks to be content. When Philadelphia doesn't have anything for a week, it probably isn't much worth reading. But if they can build the network they appear to be working towards, it looks like a worthwhile experiment. Evidently someone with $10 Mil thought so.
Uses for the money will include ways to reward people that upload stories or images, and developing a system to "geo-locate" contributors so they can be found if they are in range of developments deemed newsworthy.
"We are moving to geo-locating people so we can do some cool stuff," Brody said.
"For example, if there is a bomb in a subway station in London or a virus breaks out in Google's cafeteria and media can't get their(sic) fast enough we can identify people on the scene already and get their content," Brody said.
NowPublic announced Monday that the fast-growing citizen journalism website has scored 10.6 million dollars (US) in financing to fuel its drive to become the world's largest news agency.
The Vancouver-based start-up says it is growing at a rate of 35 percent monthly and has nearly 120,000 contributing "reporters" in more than 140 countries.
In part of a trend referred to as "citizen journalism," NowPublic lets anyone with digital cameras or a camera-enable mobile telephones upload images or news snippets for dissemination via the Internet.
Time Magazine lists NowPublic among its top 50 websites of 2007.
"I promise you, in 18 months NowPublic will be, by reach, the largest news agency in the world," start-up co-founder Len Brody told AFP.
What we'll get from this is less sequestering of local news by the legacy media.
I wrote about a local (less than a mile from my house) bomb incident not quite two years ago that was completely sequestered by local media.
http://purpleavenger.blogspot.com/2005/09/msm-is-better-at-covering-up-news-than.html
A commenter on that post described another bomb incident at LAX that was buried by the media.
Its a good thing that there's a central distribution point for this sort of citizen reported story.
About 6 months ago my bank was robbed but no mention of it in the local media. I found out by driving up to do some banking and the place was closed with a close mouthed cop guarding it at the entrance. Next day a teller confirmed my suspicion that the joint had been robbed...apparently successfully.
Posted by: Purple Avenger | Tuesday, July 31, 2007 at 10:29 AM