A J-Source piece headlined “The Revolution will be Plagarised” counted the Canadian Election section of NowPublic and reported that, as of 2 p.m. on 11 September, “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”. Its charge was that the citizens were failing the site.
Len Brody, speaking to a packed room at the ONA conference, answered that NowPublic was not a citizen journalism site to begin with. His term for what it did was news-mapping: guiding people through a story assembled from both traditional coverage and audience contributions. A story, in that model, is “a kernel, a seed, a starting point” that others add to with pictures, video or comment, and the value sits in the discussion around it rather than in the initial content. The editorial team of around ten, led by the former BBC journalist Rachel Nixon, were called editors but worked with the community — Brody’s phrase for them was “educators-in-chief”.
The numbers he gave: launched two and a half years earlier, two million readers a month, five times the traffic of a year before, on more than $10m of venture money. He called the company a technology business that has content, and pointed to a newly announced scan tool that aggregated, geo-located and analysed updates from Twitter and Pownce in near real time.
The questions from the ONA floor were about ethics, accuracy and quality — newsroom tests applied to a company that had not asked to be judged by them.