VentureBeat

In recent years, many journalists (including myself) have experimented with web services intended to help journalism go online, and those efforts have failed.

We’d hoped that things like better newsroom software or local community sites would allow quality reporting to run efficiently and survive as web businesses. But these efforts were often top-down. Newsroom software tried to mirror the needs of the traditional newsroom, for example.

But newsroom software hasn’t thrived. Rather, the more successful software has bubbled up from beneath, in the form of blogging software — things like Wordpress and Movable Type, along with RSS feed distribution services like Feedburner, and news aggregator sites like Digg and Techmeme.

So it’s with great interest that I talked to journalist/blogger Scott Karp last Friday, about the $2.75 million his company Publish2 has raised from Velocity Interactive Group, the new, digital media-focused venture firm.

Publish2 intends to be a sort of news aggregator that’s based on the stories that journalists — broadly defined to include bloggers — think are interesting, so not unlike Digg or Techmeme. It’s a social bookmarking site, where each user adds the links from news stories they find from around the web, like Delicious. It’s also a sort of journalism-profession networking service, where users can create their own professional profiles that includes link to their stories, that their peers (and potential employers) can check out.

The big idea is that the collective knowledge of all of these journalists will generate a high-quality collection of content, that will in turn lead to journalists becoming more informed, faster — and lead them to adopt best practices of online publishing, like linking to other sites’ articles.

Unfortunately, Karp is refusing to send beta invites to other bloggers and myself for the time being, so I can’t provide a full review. But from his description, there are various views that a user can see — the stories they themselves bookmark, the stories that people in their own newsroom are bookmarking, and the stories that everyone on the site is bookmarking. This will allow newsrooms to quickly see notable writings from other people. It may even lead to mainstream publications linking to other web sites, which is something they don’t do now due to old-fashioned competitive feelings — even though linking is an important component of engaging in conversation (and getting traffic) on the web.

Publish2, which has been in the works since last summer, will also include a component where each publication can include links to stories from other sites via Publish2 in a widget on its own page.

The company also plans to integrate into the wide, haphazard array of publishing software in use at news organization: from things like the open-source content management system Drupal, to the many aging proprietary software at newspapers around the world.

A big advantage the company has is its deep connections in the journalism world. Its board of directors includes Jeff Jarvis, another new media thinker with roots in established media, and other well-known journalists, along with Velocity’s Ross Levinsohn (who bought MySpace for News Corp while he was still with Fox) and Jonathan Miller (a former AOL executive).

The combination of bottom-up content paired with editorial sensibilities is intriguing to this reporter. I’m looking forward to getting the site’s invite.

Generate is a two year old effort run by executives who have left their big companies for the startup life. The company creates compelling short videos on small budgets, that are distributed across the web, television and mobile devices.

The Santa Monica, Calif.-based company has just raised $6 million from Velocity Interactive Group — this is also another move by Velocity to assemble a portfolio of complementary media companies. More on that in a minute.

Generate’s model is one sense a “throwback to the early days of Hollywood,” Velocity’s Ross Levinsohn tells me. Like in the old days, Generate handles nearly every aspect of production and distribution for the 100-some its actors, writers and directors it counts as partners. For example, it will produce and distribute the next 25 episodes of “Pink: The Series,” a series of short videos featuring a female assassin, that has been viewed more than four million times since it launched last September (see below). Other Generate shows you may have heard of include comedy the “Home Purchasing Club” for VH1’s Vspot, as well as TV series like “The Andy Milonakis Show” and “Wonder Showzen.”

Generate was founded by a group of executives including Jordan Levin, its new chief executive. He left a successful, decade-long career at The WB to start the company, bringing along contacts in media and advertising.

The company has been finding success selling video advertising, with the pitch that they offer premium content that highly targeted groups of users like, that advertisers can feel comfortable associating their brands with. Ad formats range from pre-roll, mid-roll and post-roll to overlays and other forms of video advertising.

Although there’s no formal agreements between Velocity’s portfolio companies, here’s how they are positioned to work together. First, Generate creates the content and cuts deals with advertisers. Then, Broadband Enterprises, a company that distributes videos and video advertising to many other partners (our coverage), helps Generate to distribute its content across the web, mobile devices and TV networks. Meanwhile, widget company Mixercast (our coverage) offers a way for Generate to get its content to spread virally among social network users, as they add and share widgets that feature its artists’ works.

The funding round for Radar Networks that we briefly mentioned last week has been officially announced. It turns out that the company took $13 million more, and added Ross Levihnson, the former News Corp. exec and head of Myspace, to its board of directors.

We spoke with CEO Nova Spivack toward the end of the week, and he filled us in on a few more details. Twine, the semantic application aimed at collecting and organizing information for business professionals (more background here), has been in a limited beta with only a small group of users coming on since it was announced last October.

Early next month, Spivack plans to release a new version, and simultaneously open up further and let in some press (so we’ll finally have a full review of the site). Then, over the two months following, Twine should open fully.

However, Spivack says that the features new users will find on the site are only about 10 percent of what’s planned over the next year or two. Eventually, with the help of Levihnson, he hopes to make Twine an “on-ramp to the Web”.

What does that mean, exactly? We’ll have to wait to see the details, but the end result may look something like a combination RSS reader, wiki, and communication tool that keeps itself updated and organized.

The $13 million round was led by Levihnson and Baris Kardogan at Velocity Interactive Group. Previous investors Draper Fisher Jurvetson and Vulcan also participated. The company has taken $20 million to date, including its $5 million first round funding and $2 million of venture debt.

Controversy has swirled around digital media-focused venture capital firm Velocity Interactive Group from its beginnings last year. Now, more details about the Silicon Valley-Los Angeles firm’s saga are being reported by PEHub.

The tale of Velocity shows how unnerving change is hitting the digital media investing market. Astronomic valuations for companies like Facebook have led to many other digital media companies raising their own valuations, as PEHub’s Dan Primack describes — throwing Velocity’s original investment plans out the window.

Velocity’s story also shows how venture capital can be a cold-blooded sport. Partner Roland Van Der Meer (top left) made a surprisingly ruthless move in December to cut off his partners (at his former firm, ComVentures) at the knees, telling them to clear out their desks on the morning of a limited partners meeting where a new firm would be announced — and this, even after Van Der Meer worked with at least one of them, Michael Rolnick (bottom in image), for nine years.

Read the story yourself, because it provides insight into the sort of mentality you may sometimes have to deal with if you get involved with venture firms. I found myself in the middle of the saga at one point when I had a surreal phone call with Rolnick as it was all unfolding. As he drove in his car a couple of weeks before the December meeting, Rolnick was telling me that a partnership with a new partner, Ross Levinsohn (middle in image above, and the former News Corp. exec who had helped acquire MySpace and was now trying to form a fund to rollup media properties) was set in stone. I knew something was up when I called Levinsohn a few minutes later to confirm, and he denied anything of the sort. Things would twist and turn over ensuing weeks, and Levinsohn did agree to work with ComVentures (but with Van Der Meer, leaving out Rolnick; read Dan Primack’s story to follow it all). It was clear things were headed for trouble.

I think Primack makes the right conclusions. The Valley’s entrepreneurs have become suspicious of Van Der Meer over the last few years, as he continues to make moves that show he is difficult to trust personally (we’ve covered these events on several occasions). Van Der Meer’s response has always been that he is just doing what good business requires, and that decisiveness, even if hurts people, is part of doing business in Silicon Valley. Fair enough, then, as long as you know his approach going into a relationship: You could get thrown on the street if you don’t perform.

At the same time, though, there’s a sense that Levinsohn and his partner Miller have the skill and contacts it takes to make a good investment team but that they may not have appreciated the depth of suspicion in the valley about Van Der Meer. Now, as the firm tries to raise the money it will need to invest media properties, the LPs are asking the same questions. This will be interesting to watch.

Coincidentally, we made several calls to Levinsohn yesterday about an unrelated matter, none of which were returned. We hope to get an update today.

Update: See comment below, which concerns Jeb Miller, another ComVentures partner cut off by Van Der Meer. I’ve never met Miller, and forgot, or was never aware of, his move to ComVentures from WorldView. I haven’t confirmed, nor do I endorse, the contents of the comment below, but it is true that WorldView is another firm that has had personal problems in its ranks (see my coverage here).