Korea: citizen journalism’s fleeting success?
OhmyNews, the Korean online newspaper whose content is in majority edited by readers, is expected to start losing money in 2006, after 4 years of narrow profits.
OhmyNews was created in 2002 by magazine journalist Oh Yeon-Ho. Its formula of publishing mainly articles from citizen journalists was a huge success in Korea, to the point that the site was suspected of having highly influenced the result of the presidential race in 2002. OhmyNews’s staff counts now 65 journalists and 44,000 citizen contributors, who produce around 150 articles a day.
OhmyNews received 11 million dollars from Softbank Corp in February this year in order to export the formula abroad. The English version is edited by nearly 1,500 citizen journalists form 100 different countries, but it did not attain the expected global audience, and is read especially in the developing countries. Launched two months ago, OhmyNews Japan has not had the expected success so far.
Observers form the press industry began to wonder if OhmyNews’ success was a regional phenomenon, triggered by the general distrust of Koreans towards major media companies. Critics claim that the increasing development of blogs will cause users to lose interest in citizen journalism sites such as OhmyNews.
OhmyNews executives reply that blogs will never have the credibility of their online publication, where the articles of citizens are constantly screened, edited and fact-checked by professional journalists.
Source: businessweek through LSDI (in Italian)
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I don't think participatory or citizen journalism is a regional phenomenon.
Being one of the founders of cafebabel.com, I'd like to draw your attention on this European citizen journalism website. Cafebabel.com is a European magazine in 7 languages (French, English, German, Italian, Spanish, Catalan and Polish) entirely produced by voluntary contributions from European from the Continent. In Paris, France, a team of professional editors (9 employees) edits the articles and ensures the journalistic quality of the website.
The aim of cafebabel.com is to be the first European media intiative analysing current affairs from a genuine European perspective - and not national.
Cafebabel.com is an NGO, with an business model based on private and public fundings. A few advertising have also been launched recently.
Cafebabel.com is still fairly small (350 000 visitors per month) but the growth of the readership is constant. In 2007, we will launch a totally new website in 2.0.
For more info, you can contact me... or log on to cafebabel.com
Alexandre
www.cafebabel.com
It's interesting. The evolution of internet has taken many by surprise; and with web2.0 now, it's increasingly looking like more of e-media and less of e-commerce for the future of internet. Unlike transactions-based revenue, advertisement-based revenue is likely to generate more money.
I am from India, and I too have been associated with Ohmynews international lately. I find my experience with Ohmynews to be much better than what I expected when experimentally I submitted my first article with their editorial team, hardly couple of months back.
The point that blogs would be a threat to ohmynews is both correct and false. Let's ask two basic questions: Why should someone write a blog and why should someone visit a blog. All my articles of Ohmynews is also there in my blogs, but unlike Ohmynews which gives me thousands of readers directly within days (and many more through syndication), I hardly get tens of readers in my own blogs. So as a writer of quality blog (I hope so as everybody else feels), as my objective of blogging is to share my ideas with the rest of the world; Ohmynews increases that rich by hundred times.
2ndly - why should someone visit a blog? To get multiple perspectives, but not polarized wrong perspectives. Towards that too, the editors of Ohmynews provide professional balance and credibility check.
And coming to blogs and professional news; various surveys have shown that many bloggers, who may not be writing for organized press are much well aware about events in their fields; and do posses better educational and analytical capabilities than many of the news-reporters and their editors. So when Ohmynews (or anyone else) manages this task well, it effectively means outsourcing content generation from some who does it best. The business and revenue model may be faultering today for Ohmynews; but it definitely sounds a viable business model. And I am sure that the company would be able to deservingly see better days.
Because Rupert Murdoch said newspaper industry is dead does not mean it's dead already, but it means at this shift. Lately even Myspace is facing problems; and all offline medias have seen fall in their circulations and advertisement; which also means increased online presence and competition for pureplay online medias.
It's going to be interesting - that's what one can say. Identifying long term winner and loser may be too prematured at this stage. Out of closed to $500 billion global ad-spent, share of internet is hardly 3-4%. The all important question is how high can it get and that too how fast.
Ranjit Goswami.
Research Scholar, Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Kharagpur
India.
I think the concept of citizen journalism is universial, implementation and environment is 'local'. To find out more, just look at the paper
THE .MY. IN OHMYNEWS:
A USES AND GRATIFICATIONS INVESTIGATION INTO THE MOTIVATIONS OF CITIZEN JOURNALISTS IN SOUTH KOREA.
Copyright by Shaun Sutton
September 2006
University of Leeds
United Kingdom
http://image.ohmynews.com/down/etc/1/_316425_1%5B1%5D.pdf
Conditions, needs and wants are different - but (even in Germany) Netzeitung.de started the 'reader edition' due soon to major relaunch.
Elena, have you ever started a newspaper? It takes years of hard work and a lot of money. OhmyNews Japan started only August 2006 - three month is not enough to adjust it to market conditions and get it right and going.
If I look at a project it must serve the community - and my humpeled impression is, that OhmyNews in South Korea has not only done this, but had and has an impact on the sociaty and country.
Hugo
(sorry for the last entry - before correction)
I think the concept of citizen journalism is universal, environment and implementation is 'local'. To find out about the environment in South Korea, look at the paper
THE .MY. IN OHMYNEWS:
A USES AND GRATIFICATIONS INVESTIGATION INTO THE
MOTIVATIONS OF CITIZEN JOURNALISTS IN SOUTH KOREA.
Copyright by Shaun Sutton
September 2006
University of Leeds
United Kingdom
Conditions, needs and wants are different - but (even in Germany) Netzeitung.de started the 'reader edition' due soon to major relaunch.
Elena, have you ever started a newspaper? It takes years of hard work and a lot of money. OhmyNews Japan started only August 2006 - three month is not enough to adjust it to market conditions and get it right and going.
If I look at a project in social media, I formost check whether it serves the community (needs and wants) and delivers enough value (but money is not the major value members expect). And my humbled impression is, that OhmyNews in South Korea has not only served the OhmyNews community of writers-readers-writers, but had and has an impact on the Korean society and politics.
Hugo