Crowdsourced Journalism - The News is NowPublic.com

NowPublic is a participatory news network which mobilizes an army of reporters to cover the events that define our world. The company currently has thousands of reporters in over 140 countries. (88858 members in 3379 cities as of May 6, 2007; and even my city Karachi is featured.)

Just for the love of writing, reporting, sharing, and be read - this army of global reporters source and share their stories in a multimedia format. Text, audio, video - all is posted at NowPublic.com.

It seems NowPublic, with its mantra “crowd powered media,” really has got crowdsourced journalism working for it. According to them, “[Within a year], the company has become one of the fastest growing news organizations with thousands of reporters in over 140 countries. During Hurricane Katrina, NowPublic had more reporters in the affected area than most news organizations have on their entire staff.”

”Crowdsourcing is a neologism for a business model in which a company or institution takes a job traditionally performed by a designated agent (usually an employee) and outsources it to an undefined, generally large group of people in the form of an open call over the Internet.” (Wikipedia, as of May 6, 2007)

Crowd-sourced Journalism is reporting and editing by the public via the Internet. Increasingly, crowdsourced media is becoming global in nature though some new sites remain local - in fact that is the appeal of such sites.