Competitor to Digg has journalists ranking their own, others' stories

If you care about this story and think it's important, we invite you to submit its headline to Digg or one of the other many fine aggregators on the Web. But if we care about this story, we may want to submit it to Publish2 instead.

Never one to be outdone in the naval-gazing department, the business of online journalism has been stuck in a quandary recently over who, amid the broader scheme of ebbing and flowing headlines, should get to decide what's important and what's not. News aggregation sites like Digg leave that job to the readers, though recently, the discussion has been about whether readers are rating stories or just their headlines.

Professional journalists would like to retain some modicum of authority in this chain of events, but the upstart publishers of the new Publish2 site would like to claim that authority using many of the same tools the readers get to use elsewhere. The newly funded service will enable journalists to maintain online profiles and to do the rating on behalf of their readers.

"Editors can curate journalist bookmarks to create feeds of headlines on any topic or theme," reads an explanation on Publish2, posted last February during a private beta period. "These feeds can easily be published on news organization website, where they'll point readers to valuable web content hand-selected by knowledgeable journalists."

That new funding, announced this morning, is a $2.75 million Series A investment from Velocity Investment Group, which also recently funded a new project from the former head of the WB Network.

"Local news content published on the web by a local news brand can be accessed anywhere in the world," wrote Publish2 co-founder Scott Karp earlier this month. "And yet it isn't - because now the distribution problem isn't a physical limitation, but instead a problem with attention. There is no way for that story to get attention on the web outside of the audience who already visits the local news brand's website because they know the brand locally. But what if there were a way for a local story on a local news brand's Web site to get national attention?"

Publish2 remains in private beta, and no word has yet been given as to its public launch.