• by Mark Walsh  @markfwal, September 2, 2009

Examiner.com is acquiring rival citizen journalism site NowPublic as it seeks to solidify its position as a hub for local news and information.

Started last year, Examiner.com provides hyper-local news across 109 cities nationwide from contributors called "examiners" who are experts in their chosen field. Through the deal, the Denver-based company plans to benefit in particular from NowPublic's technology for scanning online conversations on Twitter and other real-time sources to offer "crowd-sourced" news across 6,000 cities in 160 countries.

"We thought if we could get this technology in the hands of our 16,000 examiners, it should be pretty powerful both on the editorial and advertising sides," said Examiner.com CEO Rick Blair, who expects the number of examiners to nearly double to 30,000 by year's end.

In addition to integrating NowPublic's technology, which also includes its open-source publishing platform, Examiner.com will actively recruit new examiners from among the Vancouver-based company's "professional-amateur" contributors and writers globally. It will also serve as a test bed for new Examiner.com programs and ideas.

Under their agreement, the companies will continue to maintain separate sites, with Blair remaining as CEO of the combined entity. NowPublic co-founder and Chief Marketing Officer Michael Tippett will take over day-to-day operations of the company. NowPublic co-founder and CEO Leonard Brody will become president of Examiner.com parent Clarity Digital Group, owned by the Anschutz Company. Michael Meyers, NowPublic's other co-founder and CTO, will also join Clarity.

"By combining our tools and audience with Examiner.com's established, vetted, local content-generators, we are enabling Examiner.com...to further succeed in providing a site that attracts experts as contributors, passionate readers and the advertisers that want to reach them," said Brody in a statement.

Both sites have enjoyed rapid growth in the last year, albeit starting from a low base. Monthly U.S. traffic to Examiner.com has jumped from 735,000 to 6.1 million as of July, while NowPublic has grown fourfold from 233,000 to 1.1 million, according to comScore.

In the coming months, Examiner.com plans to broaden coverage to more than 200 U.S. markets, as well as launch in Canada this fall and continue international expansion in 2010. As part of its plan to build revenue, Blair said the company has recently assembled a direct sales staff of under 10 people.

The site currently runs geotargeted display and text AdSense ads as well as other display ads across categories including sports, entertainment, business and finance, and tech. Current advertisers on Examiner.com include National Geographic, Palm and the University of San Francisco.

NowPublic had already begun growing via acquisition itself by snapping up rumor Web site Truemors in July.

Last year, NowPublic was tapped by the Associated Press, which purchased stories and photos from the site based on the submitters' asking price. Brody said Tuesday that the partnership with AP had since ended as NowPublic focused more on building out its technology. But he added that the company was still in discussions with the AP and other news organizations about possible future alliances.

Last summer, NowPublic closed a $10.6 million first round of financing led by Rho Ventures with seed investors Brightspark and the Working Opportunity Fund participating.

Financial terms of the Examiner.com-NowPublic deal were not disclosed.