AllVoices Raises $3 Million For Citizen Journalism Site; Takes CNN’s iReport Head-On

With the events that took place in Iran last year, the Mumbai bombings and even the plane crash on the Hudson River, there's no doubt of the power of citizen journalism in today's media age. Whether it be through social media sites, such as Twitter or through news sites catered towards citizen journalism, the active voice of the eyewitness is now a significant part of any story taking place in the world. Citizen journalism platform AllVoices is seeing significant use traction and is giving its rivals ( many of which are similar sites started by traditional media companies, such as CNN's iReport) a run for their money. AllVoices also recently closed a $3 million round of funding from VantagePoint Partners, bringing the startup's total funding to $9 million.

AllVoices allows anyone to contribute blog posts, images, videos and other observations, on local and global news. The site's proprietary technology (AllVoices has filed for three patents) will tag, rank and sort news based on a global, regional, country and city pages and will determine what is breaking news and popular (in terms of phases of a news cycle). The system will also filter for spam, police the site, fact check each user report for credibility and assign a credibility rating to each news report. The site also lets users file reports from their cell phone via MMS and SMS, which is helpful to users in countries where computer usage is low but mobile device usage is high. The end goal is to provide a 360 degree view of reported news that also has a multimedia view of what's happening in the world.