Vancouver's NowPublic Buys Valley's Truemors

It's not every day that you hear of a Canadian startup buying a Silicon Valley startup, but today is that day. Via the AFP comes word that Vancouver citizen-journalism site NowPublic purchased rumor-mill Truemors for an undisclosed sum. In addition to acquiring another user-generated content site, NowPublic also gains Guy Kawasaki, former Apple evangelist (an actual job title) turned author and venture capitalist, who started Truemors and is a respected voiced among Valley VCs. Kawasaki will become the chair of NowPublic's advisory board. If you're curious about what Truemors is about, you're out of luck for the moment since the site appears to be down and redirecting to NowPublic. Update: I've been told that Truemors should be back up, pending DNS refresh. NowPublic should find great value in this acquisition if they can smoothly integrate Truemors' rumor reporting with their own crowd-powered media. Co-founder Len Brody claims that this acquisition makes them the "largest user-generated news website in the world", with more than 100,000 contributors. I dug this last comment from Brody in the AFP article, defining his view of what NowPublic is:

Brody shuns the label "citizen journalist," saying it is tantamount to branding someone a "citizen dentist." "The truth is journalism is an art form," Brody said. "Calling someone a citizen journalist just doesn't make sense. What we are is an army of eyes and ears to witness what is going on and work with journalists."