Exclusive: Digital Marketing company Datran Media has acquired Allvoices, a fast-growing citizen journalism platform. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed by the companies but we hear the acquisition was a mixture of cash and stock.
Allvoices, which has raised $9 million in funding and launched in 2008, is the brainchild of former VC Amra Tareen. The site allows anyone to contribute blog posts, images, videos and other observations, on local and global news.
Allvoices’ proprietary technology 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. And the platform 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 platform, which has hundreds of thousands of citizen journalists contributing content, has a significant presence internationally, most recently launching global news desks in 30 different cities around the world, where both professional and citizen journalists will provide regular in-country reports from the ground.
Datran Media plans to extend the Allvoices crowd-sourcing platform into other categories beyond news, and will be integrating its social distribution technology into the site’s content. Datran will also license the platform’s crowdsourced content technology to publishers and brands. Tareen will become the SVP of strategy for Datran Media and the remainder of Allvoices’ staff will be joining the parent company.
Other exits in the citizen journalism space include NowPublic, which was acquired by the Examiner in 2009 for $25 million. Hyperlocal news site EveryBlock was acquired by MSNBC, and AOL picked up Patch in 2009.