Canadian website NowPublic.com has introduced a host of new features to the site to ‘raise the bar for trust and credibility’ for citizen journalism, a press release from the site has said.

A new ranking system for members of the ‘crowd powered news site’ has been introduced to rate members based on their contributions – including factors like page views generated, comments received and number of front page stories.

A ‘presence stream’ added to the site also shows feeds of content created by users’ on external sites like Flickr, Twitter and YouTube.

Finally a news dashboard has been created to give users control over what content and which NowPublic feeds they subscribe to.