A Reston-based startup company is designing a Web publishing tool, news aggregator and social networking site with journalists as its potential audience.
The company, which is called Publish2, announced Monday an influx of $2.75 million in funding from Velocity Interactive Group, a media investment firm.
Publish2 is designing a Web portal aimed at journalists and hopes to switch from its current pilot program to a public release later this spring, according to Chief Executive Officer Scott Karp.
Karp said he got the idea for the site by looking at other social news sites such as Digg. While Digg reaches a niche technology audience, he decided journalists would be interested in something tailored to their needs.
“We’re aiming to do a model similar to Digg but have the users who are deciding what links to submit, and to vote on them, be journalists,” Karp said.
The company also would allow newsrooms to use its publishing platform to design news aggregator Web sites to be used in conjunction with the papers’ own sites, and allow newspapers to share in advertising revenue. The site will also have a social networking component where journalists can post their own resumes and links and connect with other reporters. Karp said he believes journalists will be motivated to use the site because they are under pressure to produce Web-friendly content for their site, and could use Publish2 as a means of doing that. He said general consumers would also be attracted to the site because they knew journalists were giving the articles a seal of approval.
Publish2 is running a private trial on the site in which freelance and full-time journalists as well as newspaper organizations are participating, he said.
More social networking sites are featuring content aimed at a particular group with rating systems, according to Rebecca Wettemann, an analyst with Nucleus Research. The question will be whether Publish2 can persuade journalists to share their work and link to sites that aren’t just their own, she said.
“The challenge for Publish2 is how to show reporters the value of this, and if there is any reason for a reporter to want to share rather than file and scoop,” she said.
