Brody addresses a packed ONA meeting

A piece on J-Source lays into NowPublic for reproducing content from mainstream media. Enticingly titled, The Revolution will be Plagarised, it argues that the citizens are failing us at NowPublic.

As of 2 p.m., Sept. 11, nearly 60 per cent of the stories in the citizen-journalism site’s Canadian Election section consist of quoted material from other, largely traditional media outlets.

The problem with this article is that it misunderstands what NowPublic is about. It is judging NowPublic as a site with content written by citizen journalists.

But as Len Brody told a packed room at the ONA conference, NowPublic does not do citizen journalism. Instead he talks about news-mapping, which he describes as guiding people through the news, drawing from traditional media and from contributions from the audience.

Brody explained how NowPublic views stories.  It sees a story as “a kernel, a seed, a starting point”. Others then add to it, through pictures or video or comment.

In NowPublic’s model, the discussion and debate around a story is what is valuable, rather than just the initial content in itself. This ties into Brody’s vision of NowPublic as a community.

Many of the questions at the ONA are about NowPublic works. Brody explained that the editorial side is led by ex-BBC Rachel Nixon (disclosure: my wife) and a team of around 10 people.

He said that although they were called editors, the work revolves around working with the community. They could almost be called “educators-in-chief”, said Brody.

The site, launched two and a half years ago, has 2m readers a month. Brody said the site had grown by five times since raising more than $10m in venture capital a year ago.

The reaction to Brody shows the bias of the audience at the ONA. The questions are about ethics, about accuracy and quality, essentially applying traditional media values to NowPublic.

The issue with this approach it judges NowPublic as a traditional media outlet, whereas the site is an example of the new forms of journalism emerging online. Brody describes it as a technology company that has content.

A sign of how it approaches content is its newly announced scan tool. This aggregates, geo-locates, and analyze updates from micro-blogging tools like Twitter and Pownce in near real time.

It is a sophisticated tool that makes sense of the wealth of information posted by people online and reflects how the tools are emerging to tap into the conversation on news on the web.

At my j-school, we’re created a much more humble tool, NetPrimeMinister.ca, to scour social media for the conversation around Canada’s federal elections.