NowPublic.com, the Vancouver participatory news site, was sold in September 2009 to the local news network Examiner.com for a reported $25 million. The buyer was Philip Anschutz’s Clarity Media Group, which ran the Washington D.C. Examiner, the San Francisco Examiner and the Independent newspapers along with a network of American local sites.
NowPublic had been started in 2005 by the Canadian entrepreneurs Leonard Brody, Michael Tippett and Michael Meyers, and had raised more than $10m in venture capital. Tippett told contributors the deal would put their reporting in front of a much larger audience, pointing to the thousands of Examiners writing in cities across the United States. Rick Blair, chief executive of Examiner.com, framed it as the solution to the hyperlocal puzzle: the acquisition added technology to a site claiming more than 17 million unique visitors a month.
Part of what was bought was Scan, NowPublic’s tool for reading online conversation in real time, which aggregated, geo-located and analysed material from Flickr, YouTube and Twitter.
In Vancouver the reaction was mixed. Tris Hussey of M2O Productions called the news bittersweet: something genuinely new had been built and its founders had reason to be proud, but it had been scooped up by an American company. Tippett said the company would stay in Vancouver and grow the local office. Examiner.com and NowPublic were to keep running independently.