AP embraces Citizen Journalism…and NowPublic

NowPublic, Canada’s leading citizen journalism Web site/service, has signed a deal with Associated Press that will see NowPublic’s citizen journalists contribute content (photos, text and video) to breaking stories on AP. AP will pay citizen journalists if their material is used with NowPublic getting part of the fee. "NowPublic’s idea of a working relationship between the public as citizen media, and traditional reporters in the mainstream media started taking shape in 2006," said NowPublic co-founder and CEO Leonard Brody. "This collaboration is one of the initial endeavors."

While the deal validates citizen journalism, it also provides some much-needed insight into NowPublic’s business model, which has not seen the Vancouver-based company embrace advertising as a revenue stream despite the millions of visitors it receives. Instead, the company has doggedly pursued the AP-like licensing model in the belief traditional media would turn to citizen journalists as a resource at a time when newsrooms are shrinking amid growing competition from the Web. Despite the AP deal, I remain skeptical this model will flourish given many traditional news operations tend to be snobbish about their content, which is produced by "professionals" as opposed to "enthusiastiasts".

For more views, check out SplashCast, which believes the NowPublic-AP deal is a sign that "in the long run, media companies with limited numbers of reporters can’t really compete with crowdsourcing operations like NowPublic", which has 60,000 contributors. Mathew Ingram adds that NowPublic has also recruited MSNBC founder and former editor-in-chief Merrill Brown  as chairman of the board, while MediaShift’s Mark Glaser reports on a hallway conversation he had with NowPublic’s Michael Tippett.