South Korea: citizens called to be financial donors as well as journalists

Posted by Christie Silk on July 9, 2009 at 11:24 AM

The South Korean citizen journalist site, OhmyNews, is now asking citizens for their money, as well as their news contributions. The site is struggling to cope with the global economic slump and the attendant drop in advertising revenue, alongside the proliferation of rival news media platforms.

The project's founder, Oh Yeon-ho, published his plea yesterday in an open letter on the website: "For a news media to remain healthy, it will have to earn at least 50% of its income from the sales of content or paid subscriptions. Despite our best effort, OhmyNews still relies on advertisers for more than 70% of its revenue".

A common concern in the news media industry, particularly for smaller, alternative platforms, is to reduce dependence on the notoriously fickle world of advertising as a main revenue stream. Oh explained that if 100,000 readers joined the venture contributing KRW 10,000 a month, the site would no longer have to rely on advertising revenues.

OhmyNews was founded in 2000 based on the ethos that "every citizen is a reporter". Amateurs generate the majority of the content, although the site does have a 55 person-strong journalistic and editorial team. Its target audience was primarily the young, liberal and media savvy.

Projects such as OhmyNews that explicitly invite and depend on the voluntary contribution of photos and stories, are often perceived as rising antagonistically to mainstream news providers. The more flexible business models of new start-ups as compared to those of traditional papers, moreover, were generally seen to have more capacity to cope with fluctuating economic changes.

The extent of the structural changes brought about by the global economic slump, however, has put into doubt whether such initiatives will manage stay afloat during this uncertain time. The Guardian questions whether the "novelty <of OhmyNews> has worn off" as its users migrate towards other platforms of citizen media. Moreover, there have been other indications that in this region, "the initial euphoria over citizen journalism has dissipated". Last August, OhmyNews was forced to close its Japanese equivalent, only a year after it had noisily entered the market with financial support from the Japanese media giant, Softbank.

The fate of OhmyNews is not written in stone and it will be interesting to see if its amateur contributors will prove willing to pay for the privilege of making the news. The asking for financial donation is arguably not that far away from the concept of charging for contribution. The process of user payment, therefore, whether for the contribution or viewing of content looks set to figure highly on discussion agendas for future business models.

Source: OhMyNews