It's a big day for us today here at Publisha, as we have officially launched our sister site ViewsHound this morning.

ViewsHound is the world's first crowd-sourced news and views site that pays daily cash prizes for the best articles. See www.viewshound.com for the site.

Really, we were inspired by seeing a need to help Publisha users to market their articles more effectively than a lot of you were able to do so. So we created a site where you can submit your articles and we do all the promotion work for you.

We think that this site will appeal to a wide range of writers: journalists, bloggers, article marketers, people who write on behalf of a business, charity campaigners, and anyone with a point of view that they want to get across to the world.

Anyone can submit articles, and we pay out a $120 prize fund every day, which we're working to increase as fast as we can. Just see the ViewsHound Writing Guidelines to see what we're looking for. 

Help us spread the word: Please Like ViewsHound on Facebook and Follow ViewsHound on Twitter to help spread the word, so that we can increase our prize fund faster.

There's only two days until the launch of our second site, ViewsHound.com, on May 2^nd, where we’ll be handing out the launch prize fund of $1,000. There's still time for you to enter, so get submitting your articles now!

For more info on how you can enter to win, and bring more traffic to your site, see the ViewsHound homepage.

Check the writing guidelines at www.viewshound.com/write for all you need to know.

Publisha has got some very exciting news that we can finally make public today!

We’ve spoken to hundreds and hundreds of Publisha users over the last year, and we’ve consistently heard that most of you find it easy to write articles, but difficult to promote your site and gain readership. So we thought we’d launch a sister site that takes a different approach! This time you just focus on the writing, and we’ll do the rest! (Seeing as this is a crowd-sourced community effort, any promotion that you can do will really help us to grow the site quickly.) 

ViewsHound is going live on May 2nd, but you can sign up right now and get busy. Here’s the low-down, and why we think you’re going to love it:

ViewsHound is the first crowd-sourced news site to offer daily prizes for the best articles, photographs and cartoons. The site will focus on opinion and comment pieces and contributors are invited to compete for a daily prize fund of $120.

We’ve also got a pre-launch prize fund of $1,000, made up of one $500 top prize and 10 prizes of $50 each for material contributed before May 2nd. You can sign up right now to compete to win one of these pre-launch prizes.

The site will have major sections covering politics, business, travel, sport, technology, art and culture, and will be promoted heavily to build a large and active reader base.

Whether you win a cash prize or not, everyone who contributes can link their articles back to their blog and benefit from ViewsHound’s traffic. We hope that many journalistic careers can be launched and sustained by ViewsHound.

Anyone is welcome to submit material for consideration. We use human editors, plagiarism checkers and other filters to make sure that everything published is original and of high quality. Right from the start we want ViewsHound to be about quality content that people want to read, and will carefully choose the material that makes it onto the site.

The ViewsHound website is at www.viewshound.com and the ViewsHound Facebook page is at www.facebook.com/viewshound. If you want to help us spread the word, become a ViewsHound fan on Facebook.

It's always nice to get fan mail from our users, and even better when the user has gone to the trouble of recording a video!

So here's video blogger Kelsie Morales telling us why she uses Publisha. You can see her Publisha site at www.kelsiemorales.com.

Publisha today announced the launch of its hard-hitting online photojournalism magazine Auto de Fe. Auto de Fe is free to readers, at www.autodefe.com or www.facebook.com/autodefemag.

The magazine aims to uncover stories of real significance, to spend quality time with the people whose lives are profoundly affected by what is happening around them, and to showcase gritty photographs of the world as it truly is.

For the first issue, Auto de Fe sent a photographer to Bhopal in India, 26 years after the Union Carbide disaster, to see how people are coping with its aftermath – fighting for compensation and help against the odds, and ignored by their government, with the outside world apparently bored with their story. During his investigations in the Union Carbide Corporation's factory the Auto de Fe photographer was hospitalised for five days due to chemical exposure.

Other stories in the first issue include a look at a denim factory in Cambodia specialising in taking in brand new jeans and giving them exactly the right wear and tear to make them desirable to the in-crowd. The magazine also features a photo-story from Helmand province, showing the last British presence there before the handover to American forces, and then returns to London to follow a drag queen on a tour of performance venues!

Auto de Fe is actively seeking high quality contributors who are looking for an audience for their story. Possible contributors should email the editor of Auto de Fe, Ian Howlett, at autodefe@publisha.com.

Auto de Fe is at www.autodefe.com or www.facebook.com/autodefemag.