Now Public is a Vancouver Canada based citizen journalism site that provides a forum for users to link to, create and comment on news that’s important to them.

Rather than a popup window, Now Public frames the news site making it easy to both comment and view the news story you are posting. They also have a rights management platform for the photos and videos you upload so you can set how other users or news sites can use and distribute your content.

I can see Now Public being a resource for me to post about some interests that I have an opinion on but not enough of a content focus to build a whole blog on. The value is if I want to link to or write an article on the Edmonton Oilers hockey team, I’ve got a venue to do it with a potential for more traffic than if I were to generate my own niche Oilers blog.

Citizen Journalist sites face the old chicken and the egg problem. Without a ton of readers, I’m less inclined to put my news or commentary on a site. Without a ton of TARGETED content, you have a difficult time getting readers. A generalist citizen journalism platform is a challenging proposition.

Sites like Digg picked a niche of geek tech news and have done very well. They are THE source for the latest geek news. If Digg was ANY news rather than a tech focused news, I don’t think they would be nearly as successful. Of course Digg doesn’t let you create new content is only the distribution side of the equation.

As a voracious consumer of news and information, I’ll hit Findory or Google News for my ‘world news’ as they learn what kind of news I’m interested in. Alternatively, I’ll hop on CNN. This provides me no way to be a part of the discussion, but when it comes to world news, I just want to know ‘what’s going on’.

Though I’m certainly not an expert in citizen journalism, I do know what I’m missing that I would love to have – laser-beam focus on the local. I have no way to get my 6 o’clock local news via RSS today. Our two daily news papers, The Edmonton Journal and Edmonton Sun (both without RSS feeds) just don’t get it. City TV has an RSS feed but they don’t have the other side of the equation, the ability to create a discussion around the news by enabling comments.

I’m a believer in citizen journalism and know that a platform that can successfully facilitate the quick and easy capture and distribution of news and commentary is a great business.

My recommendations (for no:
- Seed the news - Get some student journalists and seed the Now Public site with local news. Even if it was as simple as linking to all the ‘big media’ articles and providing a little commentary. That would seed the site as a resource. Once there was a critical mass, I think you’d see new content being created to compliment and extend the ‘big media’.
- Personalization - I really don’t know how many articles are on Now Public but if it were to learn from my reading behaviors, and show me news it thinks I’d be interested in, that would be a big step.

Disclosure: Leonard Brody was one of our instructors at the ACVC event in California, he’s a great Canadian and is co-CEO of Now Public.

Technorati Tags: citizen journalism, digg, edmonton, news, now public, web 2.0, web2.0, web20