Congrats to the NowPublic management team on closing their $1.4 million angel round. (Disclosure: I’m an advisor and now a minor investor.) I got some perspective on how hard it is to facilitate and encourage citizen journalism working on Bayosphere last year.

NowPublic‘s come a long way since the first site I saw that they launched at PC Forum 18 months ago. It’s completely different now, with more than 2 million visits/month, and 15,000 reporters posting links, stories, and a ton of video footage. The NowPublic tools for protecting these media assets, managing them, and aggregating it all so others can build real stories is new and different.

I dont’ know of any other news-focused citizen-journalism entity that even comes close to this many participants. And, with the proving of their tools and platform — something of a mix of features found at Digg, Newsvine, a video editing tool, right managment, and things you just haven’t seen–the team is finishing up their first offering for other publishers, their On Demand Reporting system.

But what can you do there?

At NowPublic you can:

• Point people to news and events that are important to you.
• Make the news better by contributing photos, video or audio to any news story.
• Store your footage, share your photos and videos with the world, and protect your intellectual property – all at the same time.
• Get free news footage to use on your blog.