OhmyNews marks 10 years as citizen news site

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A veteran of the citizen journalism movement, Korean news organisation OhmyNews is celebrating its 10th birthday.

Established in 2000 with just four employees, the site has built a strong following for its pro-am approach to news and commentary, using a team of in-house editors to fact check and approve articles from non-journalists, who initially received payment for their contributions.

Since its foundation by now president and CEO Oh Yeon-ho, a range of sites for user-generated or citizen news have been launched, but few have lasted as long or been as influential as OhmyNews.

The site is, for example, thought to have been instrumental in aiding the election of former South Korean President Roh Moo Hyun, a reformist lawyer and hitherto relatively unknown candidate, who died last year, through its campaign for mainstream media coverage of the death of two Korean schoolgirls by a US armoured vehicle in 2002.

"OhmyNews has been exploring how to create a form of journalism that builds on the open processes of the internet and the contributions of netizens," writes OhmyNews columnist Ronda Hauben in a piece marking the anniversary .

"He [Oh Yeon-ho] wanted to counter where the power and wealth of a media organization would determine the impact a news article would have."

At one point OhmyNews, which incorporates both an international English-language launched in 2004 and Korean site, spawned a Japanese edition , which was shuttered in 2008, and employed 41 staff. But the majority of its content has always been written by its users.

Last year the site announced it would be leaning more heavily on its community of contributors as part of a new business model, which asks contributors to financially support the site.

In 2009 OhmyNews was 700 million KRW [South Korean won] in the red and halfway through the year was making a loss of 500 million, despite cutting salaries and 10 staff, the site announced in July. In response the site launched the '100,000 member club' - a project asking individuals to donate 10,000 KRW (about £4.83) a month to fund OhmyNews, with an aim of signing up 10,000 members by the end of this year and 100,000 by the end of three. But by November just 5,828 contributors had joined the club .

In January 2009 the site also ended its payment scheme for contributors to its international site, replacing it with a monthly prize system.

According to columnist Hauben, however, the new model is a positive step: "It is important that a media like OhmyNews [should] not be dependent on the whims and actions of big corporate advertisers."