Citizen journalism pioneer struggling?

Posted by Martin Stabe on 22 June 2007 at 12:01
Tags: Citizen journalism, OhmyNews

The company that runs the pioneering South Korean citizen journalism site OhmyNews lost money last year on revenue of about $6 million, according to the Los Angeles Times. The site’s readership is now at around 1.5m pageviews per day, down from a peak of around 20million during its 2002 hayday, according to the same report.

It’s not the first recent styory to suggest that Ohmynews is struggling a bit. Its declining revenues have been several times over the past few months, and its venture into Japan, financed by an $11 million investment by Softbank last February, seems not to have gained traction.

Oh my… Financial trouble for citizen journalism site?

Posted by Martin Stabe on 6 November 2006 at 19:02
Tags: Journalism, OhmyNews

With its 40,000 non-journalist contributors and professionally edited content, Korea’s OhMyNews if often highlighted as the most significant example of citizen journalism.

The question that has always plagued the site, however, is whether a national citizen journalism project can be replicated anywhere elese in the the world. Some have long suspected that a unique set of conditions that existed only in Korea — high broadband penetration and popular discontent with the established media, in particular — had made possible the rise of the citizen journalism site.

In February, Ohmynews secured an $11 million investment from Japan’s Softbank to fund its international expansion, and founder Oh Yeonho gave a bullish interview to Press Gazette several months later as the Japanese version was set to launch.

But according to a story published in BusinessWeek, Ohmynews’ Japanese edition has not yet made much of an impact.

What’s worse, OhmyNews’ already modest profits have been declining. An increasingly competitive online advertising market in Korea is putting the squeeze on the site. According to BusinessWeek, OhmyNews could end its financial year in the red.

What motivates Korea’s citizen journalists

Posted by Martin Stabe on 19 September 2006 at 09:49
Tags: Journalism, OhmyNews

The more than 42,000 citizen journalists who contribute to the Korean web site OhmyNews are motivated by a desire to exercise their freedom of expression and sharing new knowledge with others, accourding to new research.

Surveying the motivations 192 OhmyNews contributors, Shaun W. Sutton of Leeds University concluded that Korean citizen journalists’ “strongest single motivating factor was to exercise freedom of expression and their most sought-after general gratification was information dispersal” — the creation of knowledge and its distribution to others.

But as has long been discussed, the study also suggested that social conditions unique to Korea might make it difficult to replicate the world’s most politically influential and commercially successful citizen journalism initiative elsewhere.

Korea’s world-leading level of broadband internet penetration and trust in the Internet as a source of information, resentment an entrenched,  establishment-orientated mainstream press and a long-repressed desire for public participation in politics stemming from a protracted transition to democracy are essential to understanding the rise of OhmyNews, according to the study.

The full study can be downloaded as a PDF.