The venerable Associated Press is the latest in a string of major media players that have announced plans to incorporate citizen-collected content into daily news offerings. Others who have already taken that leap include the BBC, MSNBC, CNN and Gannett. The AP announced earlier this month that it is entering a partnership with Vancouver, Canada-based NowPublic.com to harvest material collected by the growing company’s sizable network of citizen contributors.

Michael Tippett is co-founder and CEO of NowPublic.

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Q: What type of content will be delivered to AP?

Michael Tippett: We’re working on the protocols now. It’s going to be anything: text, photos, video, audio.

Q: Do you have a launch date?

Tippett: I can’t tell you exactly yet, but it will be very soon, in the next couple of months I would expect.

Q: Jim Kennedy, AP’s vice president and director of strategic planning, has said, “We’re not just going to take content directly from the [NowPublic] contributors and put it on the wire. We’re going to edit and verify it just like we would any other contribution.” Do you have a sense that AP will be more carefully editing NowPublic content than they have done for other sources?

Tippett: Their job is really to apply the highest possible standard to the verification of info they distribute. We’re more like a Wikipedia: there’s a very, very good chance that it’s true, but it’s not 100 percent. There’s a chance the info will be modified. Our role is to connect them with an army of roving reporters who can get the material. They will do the verification, just like they do with anything else. I don’t think they’d have any reason to think that our content would be more suspect than something that hadn’t gone through any kind of process.

Q: So a plane crashes in nowheresville, Alabama. The AP benefits from the NowPublic connection — if anyone is there to take photos. What about putting citizen journalists at risk? I’m sure we don’t want them running into burning buildings.

Tippett: That’s obviously something we think about here. We don’t want people to endanger themselves and take personal risk, and we try as best we can to advise people of that. We encourage them to be cautious when it’s warranted. We have a code of conduct that people are required to agree to and sign, and it says they’re not going to take risks just to get the story.

Q: Does it prohibit reporting from war zones?

Tippett: Not specifically. We take a relatively hands off approach at this point. We do have people in Baghdad, who typically have some experience as war journalists.

Q: Do you offer insurance for your contributors?

Tippett: Not at this point, but that would be part of an accreditation package, if you will. If you become an accredited NowPublic reporter, we would provide insurance in the event that anything would happen.

Q: Can you give us a sense of the history and goals of NowPublic?

Tippett: The company now has three partners: myself, Michael Meyers and Leonard Brody [author of the best-selling books Everything I Needed to Know about Business … I Learned from a Canadian and Innovation Nation]. We have varying backgrounds. I was the guy who came up with the idea, literally in my garage. Leonard saw this from the perspective of challenges and opportunities that the news business is facing. Technology is changing, and putting power in the hands of ordinary people. I came at it from an Internet design perspective, and saw how these new devices are changing the chain of news delivery. Because of camera phones and other devices, mainstream media’s control of the news would start to erode.

Our company has been in existence for about two years now. Much of that was an incubated garage operation. Last May we got a seed round of financing, and moved into an office. We now have a staff of 14, some in Vancouver and some in New York and Europe. We have 60,000 contributors in 140 countries. We like to think we are well on the way to being the largest news organization in the world. Reuters has 2,500 reporters. We would be able to rival them in terms of having coverage pretty much anywhere in the world.

Q: Who are these contributors? What are they like?

Tippett: We have people who are homeless, using Web cafes and libraries. The homeless have an unbelievably interesting take on city and street life. We’ve got people who were navy and NATO commanders, giving their point of view on geopolitical events; policy wonks; professors; journalism students; former and current journalists; younger people who come out of blogging traditions; and people who are just interested in covering their world. There is a huge variety in interests and professional skills.

We don’t ever call it “citizen journalism” because we find that term confusing to people. Our contributors are doing it because they think it is cool and because they have something to say. We try to secretly turn them into journalists without them knowing. Our editors help them improve their craft and try to elevate the discourse, making submissions conform to what you might think of as journalistic products. Moving forward, we might be able to provide training, press passes, insurance, accreditation, and so on, to help them gain access to the things normal journalists have access to.

Q: You’ve said the goal is to facilitate news outlets bidding on the rights to your content, with most of the money going to the contributor. What can contributors reasonably expect from the site?

Tippett: We haven’t paid anyone so far. It’s speculative, but the range is really quite wide, from 10 bucks for a story to thousands of dollars for certain video. We would take a small percentage. For a lot of people money is a consideration, but in other cases people are doing it for reasons that aren’t commercial. The vast majority of our content will be created and consumed by people who are not interested in the money. Now, we do have a tip jar, and there is a bit of a gift economy, with people helping each other some with expenses. We let people communicate with each other, and material has also been bought directly from members.

Q: How does NowPublic fit into the theory of crowd sourcing?

Tippett: One way is that we tap into the wisdom of the crowd by watching how stuff is flagged on our site. In another part, it’s not so much the wisdom of the crowd but the presence of the crowd, in that our people are spread over the whole globe, where big media can’t be, able to record and transmit breaking news.

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Brian C. Howard is a graduate student at Columbia School of Journalism. He spent five years as Managing Editor of E/The Environmental Magazine and has written for Connecticut Magazine, The Green Guide, Alternet, Fairfield County Weekly, Oceana, Clamor and Britain’s Ergo Living.