Allvoices Founder Amra Tareen on CNN iReport, Hyper-Local Strategy

Despite not having the backing of a global brand behind it, like CNN iReport, Allvoices is carving quite the niche in the citizen-journalism arena, boasting a community of 300,000 citizen reporters (compared with more than 477,000 registered users for iReport), nearly 5 million unique visitors per month and, as TechCrunch reported, closing a $3 million round of funding from VantagePoint Venture Partners to boost its total funding to $9 million. Updated at 4 p.m. ET:CNN iReport said in an email to WebNewser that it has more than 477,000 registered iReporters and the iReport section of CNN.com averages 2.1 million unique users each month alone, according to Nielsen Online, adding that iReport averages 16,112 monthly submissions (photo and video). Allvoices uses proprietary technology to allow anyone to post news-related blogs, images and videos, and the technology enables the site to tag, rank and sort content based on global, regional, country and city pages. Amra Tareen, a former venture capitalist at Sevin Rosen Funds, created Allvoices, and she discussed the differences between her site and iReport, as well as detailing Allvoices' plans to boost hyper-local content, in an email to WebNewser. Tareen wrote: Allvoices has been successful in competing with the citizen-journalism platform of a strong mainstream news brand such as CNN's iReport for multiple reasons. Our founding principle and focus is citizen journalism -- it is not a sideline or add-on to a mainstream journalism site. Anyone can report, rate and discuss on Allvoices. All perspectives are welcome, making the news and dialog more interesting and representative of the people rather than the centralized viewpoint of a few. We use technology (credibility and reputation algorithms) and community (views, comments, ratings) to rank the news. Allvoices' contributions are uncensored, unedited, unbiased -- there is no dictatorial editorial staff homogenizing or discarding news to fit a mainstream point of view. It's real news! We have a diverse global community and reach. Allvoices represents users from more than 170 countries. It's local to global news (starts on the ground and evolves from a local level to national to global). People are tired of mainstream channels. Allvoices is a bottom-up company! Allvoices is the best of CNN iReport (for citizen contribution), Digg (for citizen rating) and Google News (content from mainstream news sources, blogs, etc). Allvoices is leading a grassroots effort to reach out to hyper-local newspapers with our platform as a solution to help solve their problems. These local reporters and newspapers are our best evangelists. Most hyper-local newspapers don't have capital to build and maintain an online infrastructure. Allvoices provides this. Local papers need and want reach and discovery. Allvoices provides access to a wide audience the local paper would not otherwise be able to reach and the opportunity for the local audience to "discover" the local reporter/newspaper via the Internet (Allvoices puts a lot of SEO and online-marketing power behind local content). Allvoices provides local reporters and newspapers a much-needed incremental revenue stream through the Allvoices incentive and revenue-share programs.

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Allvoices Founder Amra Tareen on CNN iReport, Hyper-Local Strategy

David Cohen

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