OhmyNews to Expand Internationally

Posted on February 23, 2006

OhmyNews, a very popular Korean citizen journalism website, has received an $11 million investment from Softbank. OhmyNews has been more successful than many other citizen journalism communities. Heather Green at Blogspotting blogs that OhmyNews has 80 employees and 5 million in revenues.

Jeff Jarvis writes, "Until now, OhmyNews has been largely a Korean phenomenon and many have wished and wondered about expanding it to other countries but so far, this has not happened. The question has been whether Ohmy is uniquely suited to the Korean media, political, cultural, and technological landscape or whether it will work elsewhere."

We will soon see if the OhmyNews model transfers elsewhere. Using the new investment OhmyNews will try to expand internationally starting with Japan by August, 2006. From the press release:

With the recent arrival of Web 2.0 and citizen participation, OhmyNews International aims to provide citizens of the world with a global platform of participation and intends to offer a support structure for international citizen reporters.

Following the path of OhmyNews Korea, OhmyNews International will take the spirit of citizen participation as the cornerstone of its media business. At the same time, it will try to adapt its business concept and newsroom structure to accommodate the different needs and environments of each country it enters.

As its first international news venture, OhmyNews International will establish 'OhmyNews Japan' before August 2006 in Japan. 'OhmyNews Japan' will provide Japanese citizens with a multimedia platform of citizen participation, hence introducing a completely different kind of news media to Japan's media market that will live up to the spirit of Web 2.0.