Success for citizen journalism fundraising efforts: Allvoices

Posted by Elizabeth Redman on January 27, 2010 at 3:28 PM

Citizen journalism website AllVoices has raised another $3 million in funds, bringing their total start-up funding to around $9 million, TechCrunch reports. The new funding comes courtesy of existing investor VantagePoint Venture Partners.

Since its launch in July 2008, the site has seen its audience grow to almost 5 million unique visitors a month, which is considered fast for a media startup. Half of its traffic and visitors are from outside the US and the UK.

The site allows readers to contribute local and global news, in the form of blog posts, photo and video, via web or mobile phone. It uses proprietary technology to sort and filter reports between breaking and popular and by location. Functions are in place for fact-checking and users can both contribute related news to a story and award it a ranking. The site also features a newsfeed from various mainstream news sources and has plans to expand its hyperlocal news coverage in the US. In September last year Allvoices added Twitter data to its reports.

PaidContent described the user-contributed news on the site as "haphazard", noting the wide range of both serious reporting and forthright opinion. But TechCrunch points out that the site poses a significant challenge to its rivals, some of which are owned by larger media companies, such as CNN's iReport. AllVoices has a community of 275,000 citizen reporters in more than 160 countries. By late 2008, iReport had 118,000, but no word on how many it has now.

Non-profit professional news organisation The Texas Tribune just announced that it raised close to $4 million last year, surpassing a fundraising goal of $3.5 million. The investment in AllVoices is another piece of good news for non-traditional media outlets.

Sources: TechCrunch, paidContent