NowPublic.com, the Vancouver-based participatory news service, drew a run of Canadian press attention in March 2008, including a mention in a Canwest News Service report on the protests over Tibet.
Co-founder Len Brody used the coverage to state an unusually specific ambition: the company’s job, as he described it, was to own the space and time between an event happening and its arrival on the web, and to be at the location faster than anyone else in the world. That is a claim about latency rather than about reporting, and it explains what participatory news services of the period were actually selling — a distributed network of people who were already standing where something happened.
In a separate piece in the Vancouver Sun, also Canwest-owned, co-founder Michael Tippett played down the idea that sites like his would displace newspapers. “Newspapers will always play a role in people’s reading habits, in their news diet,” he said, adding that there was a particular pleasure in reading a printed paper that a laptop did not replace. He defended the wider project on principle rather than as a substitute, saying citizen journalism mattered “for the same reason a democratic society and a free market are important.”