Publish2, the company that Robert Young and I co-founded in 2007, has been in private beta since late last year.

As anyone who has followed my blogging recently probably knows, Publish2 is long on vision. We believe Publish2 is a BIG idea — a realization of everything I’ve ever written about on the Publishing 2.0 blog (one reason why we adapted the brand).

We’re also long on learning, thanks to all of our dedicated beta testers, our awesome advisors — including Howard Weaver, Jack Lail, Howard Owens, and Beth Parke — and all the insightful comments and discussion around the posts where I’ve been hammering out the vision.

What we haven’t been long on is funding — through our beta development and private beta testing, we intentionally haven’t raised a dime.

I’ve come to see the experience of bootstrapping a company as akin to marathon runners who train at high altitudes, where the air is thin, which forces their bodies to increase the number of red blood cells and improve oxygen delivery to their muscles. Having trained their bodies to achieve a high level of performance with very little oxygen, returning to oxygen-rich sea level can yield significant enhancements in performance.

It’s time now for Publish2 to come down from the mountain.

Today we’re announcing that Publish2 has raised $2.75 million in Series A funding from Velocity Interactive Group — Jonathan Miller and Ross Levinsohn will be joining our board (along with Jeff Jarvis and Luke Beatty, who have been close advisors).

We’re incredibly excited to be working with Jon and Ross — they understand deeply the Publish2 vision and have a tremendous wealth of experience with transforming businesses and industries. Publish2 aims to play a pivotal role in the transformation of journalism and the news industry, and having Jon and Ross’ support and guidance is a huge asset in that endeavor.

Here’s how we’re planning to use this funding:

• Build all of the beta learning into the Publish2 platform, to make it an indispensable resource for the evolving practice of journalism — we’ve got new features rolling out over the coming months and a new design (by Unit Interactive, with Andy Rutledge leading the effort), all customized for one purpose — to help journalism succeed on the web
• Build a team of journalism innovators, whose mission will be to help journalists, editors and newsrooms integrate Publish2 into their editorial workflow and benefit from being part of larger Publish2 network

One question that’s likely on the tip of everyone’s tongue at this point is — what’s your business model? Although it’s terribly unfashionable, Publish2 does indeed have a business model — it’s still under wraps for now. (As a blogger, it kills me to keep things under my hat, but as a CEO, I just love surprises.)

What I can say is that, as much we aim to create a symbiotic editorial relationship with media companies, we also aim to create a symbiotic economic relationship — we want to be part of the business model reinvention that the news business so desperately needs. (Our funding will also support this ambition.)

Publish2 will emerge from private beta in late spring/early summer, so I’m going to hold off on any further details until that time.

In the meantime, we’re looking for an experienced PHP developer (knowledge of Drupal a big plus) to join our kick-ass development team. If you know — or are — a developer who would find the Publish2 vision compelling, let me know.

Last month, four major newspaper companies announced a joint ad sales venture to “let national advertisers place ads on local Web sites with a single phone call.” When I read that, I realized suddenly why local newspapers are having so much trouble adapting to the web.

There’s no such thing as a local website.

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The Eliot Spitzer prostitution scandal is undoubtedly a big story, which every media outlet is covering, so I suppose it’s not surprising that Google News currently shows 2,580 versions of this story. But when you stop and think about, you have to ask — WHY are there 2,580 versions of this story?

You can hum along with the refrain — in traditional media, with monopoly local print and broadcast distribution channels, each news brand had to run their own version of a major story, because it was the only way for local residents to get the news.

On the web, this makes… no… sense.

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How can newsrooms do more online with fewer resources? By leveraging the reporting that bloggers in their communities have ALREADY published on the web. Using “local link journalism,” reporters can seek out and link to reporting on a story that’s been published across their local blogosphere and just needs to be pulled together.

And isn’t pulling together the threads of a story what journalists do?

For example, this weekend it snowed in Tennessee — in March — not exactly a common occurrence. It’s a great old fashioned human interest story. Knoxnews.com published a news story with the facts about the storm. But what about how it’s affecting people in the community? Traditionally, that would mean sending a reporter out to do interviews and a photographer to take pictures… in the snow. Or it would mean making do with some wire copy and photos.

But the beauty of the web is people in the community were already posting their thoughts and pictures online. So all Knoxnews.com had to do was link to them (using Publish2, of course).

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The link journalism meme seems to have legs, based on the number of smart people who picked it up. Now it’s time to kick it up a notch, with the concept of NETWORKED link journalism, which can give journalists, collectively, the power of Digg and Google to direct huge amounts of traffic on the web.

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I was reading the New York Times public editor’s rebuke of the NYT McCain ethics piece that alleged an affair with a lobbyist, when a line at the end reached out and grabbed me by the collar (bold is mine):

The pity of it is that, without the sex, The Times was on to a good story. McCain, who was reprimanded by the Senate Ethics Committee in 1991 for exercising “poor judgment” by intervening with federal regulators on behalf of a corrupt savings and loan executive, recast himself as a crusader against special interests and the corrupting influence of money in politics. Yet he has continued to maintain complex relationships with lobbyists like Iseman, at whose request he wrote to the Federal Communications Commission to urge a speed-up on a decision affecting one of her clients.

Much of that story has been reported over the years, but it was still worth pulling together to help voters in 2008 better understand the John McCain who might be their next president.

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A cornerstone of journalism has always been reporting what key sources say, put in context and given perspective, alongside reported facts.

It’s time to reinvent that process on the web — make it dynamic — using the fundamental mechanism for connecting information and people: the LINK

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How long does it take to launch an innovative new feature on a newspaper site? About 48 hours — that’s the standard set by innovative editors like Jack Lail at Knoxnews.com, Tom Meagher at Herald News, and Mark Briggs at Thenewstribune.com.

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Jack Lail, an editor and journalist with a deep understanding of the web, big vision, and a “let’s do it” innovator’s spirit, set out to publish “the best Tennessee election coverage that can be found on the Internet” — he rounded up a group of journalists and bloggers, set them up on Publish2, and off they went. Here’s the result on knoxnews.com:

Jack explains it best:

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Publish2 is organizing a network of newsrooms, journalists, freelancers and network-affiliated bloggers to aggregate the best news coverage of the “Super Tuesday” February 5 U.S. primary elections, leading up to it and after. Publish2 is still in private beta, but we’re going to syndicate everything out via RSS feeds.

Publish2’s web-based bookmarking feature will aggregate bookmarks from all participants, which can then be published on their sites with headline links and brief descriptions. Think Digg + del.icio.us, syndicated, with a defined group of users, rather than an open free-for-all (which can be gamed).

There’s a huge opportunity to help voters find the best election coverage in the sea of election content. Yeah, you can do it by yourself — but on the web, the larger the network, the more influential the linking — time to break down those traditional media silos.

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