With the motto of “Every Citizen is a Reporter”, South Korea-based web site ‘OhmyNews‘ has established itself as a pioneer in the field of ‘Citizen Journalism’. While it started six years back but came noticeably into the limelight after it played a decisive role in the South Korean presidential elections in December 2002 when Roh Moo Hyun was elected as the president. After that incident, OhmyNews came out as Korea’s most influential media outlets and has successfully managed to maintain its goodwill till today and enjoys a respectable name in the online community. OhmyNews at present has 90 full-time members including 65 journalists with around 44,000 citizen journalists producing 150 articles a day. The number seems quite less to me but it hardly makes any meaning since they are delivering what we can call the best. If we take an overall look at the present status of OhmyNews, it enjoys a strong position among the online communities. Many media outfits tried to clone to the OhmyNews concept but failed to do so including the Dan Gillmor’s Bayosphere
So, where does the problem arise actually?
No doubt, OhmyNews is doing great in Korea, thanks to its team of professional journalists and Korea-specific approach. Oh Yeon Ho has taken his concept of citizen journalism overseas by introducing the OhmyNews International page - English.Ohmynews - that features articles written by 1,500 citizen reporters from more than 100 countries. We can’t say that it hasn’t fans abroad as it received $11 million in February from Softbank Corp.
Well, the OhmyNews International Page was not able to create so much hype owing to the challenge to club the whole world’s news into a single page along with a user-friendly interface, which it failed to do to some extent, whereas, the case was different with respect to the Korea-specific site. The idea could have been a great hit if they had concentrated on county-specific sites.
Oh said that “I want OhmyNews to be sustainable, but my ambition is to spread citizen journalism around the world, not to make money.” OhmyNews is no doubt doing too good but it certainly needs a more effective business model in order to compete with the blogging rivals. OhmyNews will really find it hard to bring back that spark which they had ignited in Korea since increasing number of global social communities and wide-reaching blogging will make it hard for OhmyNews to keep up the sensation.
Two cool initiatives taken by OhmyNews:
•OhmyNews expects around $6-million revenue this year with 60% directly coming from the online advertising and the rest from the sale of company’s news product to portals. This business model seems feasible since it is not practically possible to appoint a reporter in every city around the globe but you can certainly have online citizen reporters around the world.
•OhmyNews Communications Director Jean Min has pointed out that they will soon come up with a Web 2.0ish version and that is indubitably the need of the hour. Though, the looks and design of the page are quite cool, still OhmyNews needs to give its users a more friendly interface that is must in order to compete with the emerging social communities that have much enhanced user-friendly interfaces.
And, I really have no doubts that OhmyNews will sort out these problems and will come up with a strong business model. It has enjoyed a well thought-of position till now and will certainly hold that for a long time.
Via: BusinessWeek
