NowPublic, the social news site I first reviewed back in January, has raised $1.4 million in an angel round. The company claims to rival Korean phenomenon OhMyNews in terms of traffic, but the Alexa data fails to impress. Meanwhile, rival Newsvine seems to be performing well.
However, NowPublic has also announced an interesting change of direction - rather than becoming yet another social news destination (a crowded space), they want to supply content to other media sites. At first blush, this sounds like the BlogBurst model - taking user-generated content and selling it to news outlets. However, what NowPublic have in mind is more innovative - they want to create an on-demand citizen journalism service. If a newspaper wants coverage of a certain event, they could presumably head over to NowPublic and request some on-demand reporting. Chief executive Leonard Brody compared the service to Reuters.
So will this work? I've no idea. We already have a few startups selling user-generated content to mainstream media (Spymedia, Scoopt, Blogburst), but Current.tv is the only thing that comes close to on-demand reporting.
![[img src="" caption="" credit="" alt=""]](http://sale-online.click/wp-content/uploads/2006/06/nowpubliclarge.png){kind=link}