The Series A financing is perhaps the largest of any citizen journalism site. OhMyNews.com of South Korea obtained an $11 million deal led by Softbank, but that was a Series B financing.

The citizen journalism site claims to have more than 100,000 contributing reporters in over 140 countries and 3,600 cities by “tapping into the news reporting potential of the hundreds of millions of Internet users, eye witnesses, bloggers and photography enthusiasts,” according to a statement. While NowPublic has a total of 20 staff members, with offices in New York, Vancouver and employees in Germany, Slovenia and Hungary, it does not have any professional editors on staff, except a former CTV reporter serving as “Actual News Guy” in helping to select stories.

The deal somewhat legitimizes not only NowPublic, but also the idea of citizen journalism, or “crowdsourcing,” as the site refers to it.

NowPublic has also expanded its prior content-sharing deal with the Associated Press, the company said in a statement. In the original deal, the AP's foreign bureaus had access to NowPublic photos and news reports, and that deal now includes the AP's U.S. bureaus.

CEO Leonard Brody told the Globe and Mail that although the site considered acquisition offers, company officials “made (the) decision that we felt we could grow this thing.” The company is focused on its plan to “build the largest news agency in the world” to become “a billion-dollar company,” Brody is quoted as saying.

Brody co-founded the company in 2005 with Michael Tippett and Michael Meyers.