OhmyNews is a pioneer in online citizen journalism. When the Korean version launched in early 2000, founder Oh Yeon Ho would have never imagined its rivalry with mainstream news organizations. With only 4 staff members running the entire website, its success resulted in an international version in 2005, referred to as OMNI. The way OhmyNews worked was that citizens would submit articles for online publication. Employees would fact check every article, and citizen contributors would be compensated. During peak performance, website traffic went up to 2 million viewers a day.
Despite its success, it was all downhill from there. Financial issues first arose in mid 2008, when OMNI made a net loss of $625,000. OhmyNews’ 75 employees and their salaries had to be scaled down. In addition, OMNI stopped paying its contributors, opting for a monthly prize system. When founder Oh appealed for funding in an open letter to contributors and readers in January 2009, its results were feeble. OMNI’s last nail in their coffin was in September 2010 when it was announced that the site was to be closed down, converting it into a blog about citizen journalism. Despite the problems, OhmyNews Korea continues to run.
There were many areas which issues went wrong from worse. First, it became extremely unrealistic for the future of Ohmynews to run with solely 75 employees. By September 2009, there were 39000 citizen journalists contributors. With a 1:520 ratio of staff to contributors, there was no sustainable, long-term solution.
This leads to the issue of valid and bias of content. As noted by OhmyNews’ code of ethics, citizens are expected to follow the honour code by not spreading false information. Relying on the honour code and a limited employee fact check raises many skeptics. That’s like expecting people to not evade fairs on the busses, the Seabus and Skytrain– with both systems, it’s impossible to properly monitor everything.
Accounting for other pitfalls, OhmyNews’ biggest problem was that founder Oh appealed for funding to the public. Asking for public donations is simply unrealistic in 2009. By this time, mainstream media had already established their presence on the Internet. At the same time, social media sites, such as Facebook and Twitter were starting to gain momentum. From a practical point of view, why should online users pay for free content already available elsewhere? People will just simply move on to free sites for their dose of daily news.
Similarly, Wikipedia also asks for donations. Ever tried reading an article to see “a personal appeal from Jimmy Wales”? And just how many times have you closed that box, thinking “Geez, and how much money does Wales have?” Quite frankly, people don’t always think about why a website may be asking for money, but to do the simple task of asking takes many by surprise. I suppose that some people may take the phrase “freedom of information” a bit too literally.
It is simply undeniable that Ohmynews played an crucial role in shaping and challenging mainstream media to go online. Nonetheless, their monetary issues and problems with content validity has disaster written all over it, forcing Ohmynews to cut their losses.