OWNI, which is run by French start-up 22mars SAS and describes itself as a 'media innovation incubator', was awarded the ONA's General Excellence in Online Journalism Award for a non-English small site at the weekend.
In its series A funding, OWNI raised €340,000 (approximately £300,000) from French investors in return for less than 13 per cent of shares in the company, a spokesman told Journalism.co.uk. The site now wants to raise between €1 million and €1.5 million for 10-15 per cent of its shares and is seeking both French and international backers.
The site, which was founded by 32-year-old Nicolas Voisin in March 2009, mixes data visualisation, analysis and stong design elements to report on digital media and technology developments. Separate channels covering science, music and politics have recently been launched under the OWNI brand.
The news sites are non-profit but are supported by a for-profit division, which devlops open-source applications and publishing platforms for news groups and other media. The group recently developed the site and application for WikiLeaks release of the Iraq war logs last month.
"While our competitors still sell time, or ad, we are the watchmakers of the news. We rather design, develop and sell publishing platforms and data visualisation to the main medias in Europe. With those revenue streams we are able to fully finance our own media, OWNI, without any ads or paywall, and remain wholly independent," Voisin said in his acceptance speech at the ONA Awards.
"We are at the same time a profitable company and a free open source media that publishes everything under a Creative Commons licence ... We're opening our second round of funding to those who believe in the need for mediation innovation experimentation and subsidiarity."
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