NowPublic relaunches with new tools to help get your words and photos online
Peter Wilson
Sun
Mark Schneider, news guy for NowPublic (left), and Michael Tippett, co-founder, at the site for their new offices. Photograph by : Bill Keay, Vancouver Sun
For a while, Mark Schneider of the website NowPublic was calling himself the managing editor.
And that’s because that’s what he was, an actual news guy — a traditional journalist, onetime CTV National News reporter and journalism instructor at the University of British Columbia — who had made the transition to a completely digital world.
The Vancouver-based site, www.nowpublic.com, was the kind of place where someone with a digital phone, who happened to spot smoke billowing from a Manhattan high-rise that had been hit by a plane (as someone did this Wednesday), would snap off a few photos and post them almost instantly.
Or they might, at a more leisurely pace, send in a story they thought was being underplayed in the traditional media.
“I was stuck on the credibility thing,” Schneider said of his decision to call himself managing editor.
Then NowPublic co-founder Michael Tippett had a chat with him.
“Tippett and I started talking about that and he said you know you’re really the actual news guy, that’s what you do here,” said Schneider.
Now Schneider’s official title is ‘actual news guy’ and his e-mail address is [email protected].
All of which, he admits, highlights how his job puts him directly into the current ideological battle between old-line journalists (alleged to be corrupt and irrelevant) and the bloggers (said to be lazy and irresponsible).
In this, NowPublic walks a middle line.
“It’s not that we think that citizen journalism is going to defeat traditional journalism,” said Schneider. “That’s not in our head at all. We like journalists. We see ourselves, all of us, as part of the news business.
“But we’re just opening up the envelope a bit and acknowledging what every journalist knows — that people who actually witness the news have important things to say about it.”
To do this Schneider and Tippett are creating a set of tools that allow the eyewitnesses to history, and those who happen to be on the scene with a digital camera (still or video) when news happens, to put their words, photos and videos into context.
It’s what Tippett refers to as “newsifying.”
The problem is, said Tippett, that the nascent citizen journalists out there with their camera phones don’t know how to get their words and photos into the public eye or how to do it within a context.
“So our core mission in some sense is to ‘newsify’ user-generated content,” said Tippett. “They witness extraordinary events, they’re there. But what do they do with it?”
To this end, Now Public offers tools — and is about to offer a bunch more with a relaunch in mid-November — that make it easier for on-the-spot observers to file their words and images.
“We’re starting to provide some journalistic protocols that all journalists ask of themselves,” said Schneider. “And some of these are already implemented in our new highlight tool where we say, okay, if you’re going to write a headline try those tricks.
“And what are the five Ws of journalism? So there’s some prompting going to happen so that people can add value to their contributions and that increases the credibility not only of what they’re doing, but also their pleasure in being part of this process.”
© The Vancouver Sun 2006
