Oh My News Hit with Financial Problems
UPDATE: One Free Korea has more on the Oh My News’ “professional reporting”.
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Are the glory days of President Roh’s favorite media outlet Oh My News over just like he is? Let’s hope so:
Few doubt that OhmyNews, which galvanized younger voters, contributed to the election of President Roh Moo Hyun, who was portrayed by Korea’s mainstream newspapers as a dangerous leftist with little chance of victory. OhmyNews readers, prompted by citizen journalists’ reports that Roh was trailing in the vote, sent out a blitz of text messages urging friends to vote for Roh, and he prevailed by a narrow margin.”Ordinary citizens found a medium to serve their interest and express themselves,” says OhmyNews Chief Executive Officer Oh Yeon Ho.
OhmyNews has since become one of Korea’s most influential media outlets. However, the site continues to look for a profitable business model and is expected to lose money in 2006. This comes after a several years of very modest profits. OhmyNews, set up in 2000, now has about 90 full-time staffers—65 of them journalists—and some 44,000 citizen contributors. Together, they produce around 150 articles a day. This year, it expects revenues of about $6 million, 60% of which come from online ads and the rest from the sale of the company’s news product to Internet portals, and from miscellaneous services.
Let me get this right, they have a staff of 155 people and are only able to release 150 articles a day? That is less than one article on average per person that works there. Plus many of the articles they do produce are crap as I have long demonstrated (here are a couple of my favorite examples from my archives 1 & 2). Is there any wonder why they are losing money to blogs?:
Critics say OhmyNews will have a hard time trying to repeat the sensation it sparked in Korea. It competes for the attention of Net users in increasingly crowded markets, many of which might not really crave its maverick style of journalism. Apart from social-networking sites and portals that are increasingly developing into important news distributors, the explosion of blogging worldwide will probably make a dedicated citizen-news site less attractive in the future.
Even in Korea, fierce competition for online advertisements is expected to push OhmyNews into the red this year, according to company executives. “In any industry, no business model is sustainable unless you constantly seek innovation to adapt to new changes,”says OhmyNews Communications Director Jean Min. He adds that his company will soon come up with a revamped version that befits the Web 2.0 era. One option under consideration is giving readers certain editorial rights, Min says, without offering further details.
OhmyNews execs say the biggest difference between blogs and their service is the role of professional journalists. Blogs don’t have the credibility of OhmyNews, where professionals screen, edit, and fact-check stories from ordinary folks to filter out inaccuracies and potentially libelous claims, the company argues. Whether that kind of quality control will differentiate OhmyNews from competing sources of news and commentary remains to be seen. For the moment, though, the company remains long on idealism but short on a workable business strategy.
“Blogs don’t have the creditbility of Oh My News?” You have got to be kidding? I trust information coming from blogs like the Marmot’s Hole more than I do from Oh My News and I’m willing to bet many people agree with me. Than the claims they are professional journalists who fact check their articles is totally laughable with the number of errors and sensationalism that I and others in the K-blogosphere have shown.
With their financial problems now becoming public, it is now very clear why President Roh is giving Oh My News public funding to support them. Wouldn’t this be like President Bush giving tax payer dollars to the Weekly Standard? It is however quite clear that if Oh My News doesn’t change their ways they are going to be going the way of President Roh; limited time left and increasingly irrelevant.
HT: Asiapundit
