NowPublic

» see nowpublic.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

By 2007 I was reading the news online the way everyone was, on a broadband line that had stopped being a novelty, and the phrase running through every article about the internet that year was citizen journalism. NowPublic was the company that took the phrase most literally. I never filed anything to it and I doubt I ever landed on it deliberately. What carried across the distance was the argument, which was loud and which sounded correct.

Michael Tippett started it in Vancouver in 2005 with two co-founders. The pitch was arithmetic. For any given event, the number of people already standing there holding a camera is larger than the number of reporters anyone can send, and it is larger by orders of magnitude. NowPublic gave those people somewhere to file and built the tools to pull in what they were posting elsewhere anyway. In 2007 it claimed 119,000 contributors across 140 countries. It kept climbing past 6,000 cities from there.

The money and the credentials arrived together. On 30 July 2007 it closed a $10.6 million round from North American venture funds. Time put it on the fifty best websites list for that year and the Guardian called it one of the five most useful news sites on the web. In 2009 it picked up an Emmy nomination in advanced technology, which is not a thing that happens to a website by accident. In September of the same year Clarity Digital Group bought it.

~ the case file ~

~ the promise ~

The idea was not silly and it did not turn out to be wrong. Almost everything NowPublic described happened. Ordinary people with phones became the first and often the only record of events that no news organization reached in time, and the wire services now build workflows around exactly that.

What NowPublic could not do was own it. The function moved to platforms that did not have to recruit anybody, because people were already posting there for their own reasons. A site whose entire proposition is "come here and file" loses to a site where the filing is a side effect of something else. By 2010 the something else was Twitter.

~ the sale ~

Clarity Digital Group was owned by the Anschutz Company and it ran Examiner.com, a hyperlocal network that paid contributors according to how many pageviews their posts drew. That is a different business from the one NowPublic had been describing for four years, even though the two look identical on a spreadsheet. One of them wants the witness. The other wants the traffic.

Nothing dramatic happened after the purchase. The site kept running and kept accepting posts, and it stopped being talked about. The founders moved on. Four years went by in which NowPublic was a line item inside a content operation that had bought it for reach rather than for what it was.

~ what got buried with it ~

On 27 December 2013 nowpublic.com stopped serving the site and started serving a redirect to examiner.com. Examiner.com itself closed in July 2016, so the redirect outlived its own destination by less than three years. What nowpublic.com does today is load a nearly empty page whose only instruction is to bounce you to a lander.

Eight years of eyewitness posts from 160 countries went into that transition and nobody has said where they ended up. There was no handover of the archive to a library and no export offered to the people who wrote it. The argument NowPublic made about ordinary witnesses turned out to be completely right, and the evidence it collected proving so is the part that did not survive.

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