• by Wendy Davis  @wendyndavis, May 29, 2013

A Web user who contributed to NBCNews.com's citizen journalism site Newsvine has sued the company for allegedly depriving her of money she earned through a revenue share program.

Kathleen Wilkes of Wisconsin says in her lawsuit that she earned around $180 from Newsvine's prior business model, which paid users 90% of ad revenue associated with material they posted to the site. Wilkes says she requested payment in February, but that the company refused to pay her.

Newsvine quietly revised its revenue-sharing program late last year, and as part of that shift, required contributors to claim any proceeds they were owed by the end of the year, Wilkes alleges. Newsvine informed users about the change by posting an article to its home page, according to the complaint.

But Wilkes says that like many other users, she never saw that article, which ran in November and carried the headline “Newsvine Now Supports Google AdSense.” She also says the company buried the most critical information at the end of the article. The last two sentences of the article said that November was the last month that users would receive 90% of ad revenue. “Newsviners must cash out -- or donate -- their earnings Monday, December 31st,” the article ended.

She alleges in her complaint, filed in state court in Kings County, Wash., that the company only displayed the headline of the article on its home page. Users would never see the critical passages unless they clicked on the headline and read the article to the end, she says.

Wilkes alleges that the article's title “was unfair and deceptive,” because it didn't adequately inform users that the company was changing the terms of its revenue share agreement, which had been in effect since 2009. “The majority of users never saw or clicked on the link to the article and did not know that Newsvine was purporting to change the terms of the 2009 user agreement,” she alleges.

Her lawsuit alleges breach of contract and violations of Washington state consumer protection laws. She is seeking to represent a class of all Newsvine users who had unclaimed money in their accounts as of February.