Examiner.com gets the scoop on NowPublic
NowPublic has been, for years, one of the crown jewels of Vancouver’s tech scene. Born a block away from where I’m sitting here in M2O at 1 Alexander Street in Gastown, I remember visiting their offices in the early days (I was one of the early NP users as well, number 211 in fact) and watching as they bent Drupal to their will. Today it’s whole new world, NowPublic has been bought by Examiner.com (a site with a similar model as NP):
As you may have seen in the news, NowPublic has been acquired by Examiner.com. This is great news for the company, our readers and all of our contributors. Some of you may know Examiner.com but if you don’t already you’ll be seeing more of them soon. Like NowPublic, they are re-writing the rules about how news gets made. They’ve got thousands of Examiners in cities across the US writing and reporting on everything from nightlife, sports and business to technology news and education issues. This means that there will be some great opportunities for all NowPublicans to get news out to an even larger audience. Stay tuned for details on how to get involved.
link: NowPublic Acquired by Examiner.com | NowPublic News Coverage
This is a bittersweet piece of news. It’s fantastic for the folks at NowPublic. They’ve created something amazing, something tremendously powerful, something new, and something that is helping to reshape how we think about news. They must be proud beyond measure. Of course on the other side of the coin, NP was scooped up by an American company. I hope that given NP and Examiner.com are going to still run independently that NP maintains its base in Vancouver and (I think) a very international/Canadian feel to it.
Okay, that’s a minor point. This is fantastically great for NP and yet another example of how the Vancouver tech scene is not only one of Canada’s, but also North America’s, hottest and innovative places to be.
Congrats guys.
Hey Tris, Thanks for the kind words and helping us get their in the early days. You'll be happy to know we'll be staying in Vancouver and expanding our local staff.
Cheers, Michael.
As a former member and guest editor of NowPublic, I will make some editorial comment here. From my experience, this merger will not benefit the public, nor will it benefit the NowPublic members. As it stands now, NowPublic restricts members on various levels, and is very indiscriminate at times on how they censor contributors. This new merger will impose even more limitations from what I have learned by visiting the Houston Examiner.com site and seeing how it is set up, and the limitations that are there versus a community journalism site.
Examiner.com does not appear to actually be a community journalism site that allows the writers the freedom to truly write what they may chose and express themselves about. Certainly some of the member comments on NowPublic do reflect most of what I express here. — Cypresso