OhmyNews’s glory is disappearing, due to low page views and sharply reduced advertising revenue, its Japanese substation has been forced to close. The main site of South Korea's page view rankings has fallen down from the peak of the world's top 100 to more than 6000. OhmyNews faces financial crisis, in order to maintain the operation of the site. Analyzing the success and decline of OhmyNews, it is easy to see the commercial model has brought this influence on it. The early success of the site benefited from this commercial route, because the commercialization makes it obtain a stable income by advertising, and achieve economic independence. For commercial citizen journalism sites, the primary task is to attract a large number of contributors or citizen journalists, to attract audiences it needs vast content on the site, and this requires a large number of journalists to contribute. Citizen journalism itself is the audience of the site, the more of them means the more hits. Therefore, the future of OhmyNews is closely related to the extent to which people are involved in news communication.
Free market leads to competition, how to stand out in the competition? In the information age, capital changes from material to immaterial, it is the knowledge economy society. For the journalism, only having more content and updating faster can attract consumers. OhmyNews made efforts in attracting people to join the ranks of citizen journalists. Using self-advertising as a way of portraying the site as individual for social identity and self-realization and also by giving the contributor material incentives. If articles submitted are accepted by the site, the author will receive a sum of money the amount is determined by the quality of the manuscript by the editor. The users have a small deposit account, if you like an author's article, the user can transfer their money in his account. As a result, some popular authors received tens of thousands of dollars in income from one or two articles. The site also selects the best manuscript of the month and gives the author a material reward. These measures are very effective, the site quickly recruited tens of thousands of citizen journalists. Many people join OhmyNews's as citizen journalists just to satisfy their curiosity. Curiosity can increase the click-through rate of the site in a short time, but it does not make the public be a positive citizen journalist.
From this, mainstream journalism began to respond to the challenges of citizen journalism and to compete with these organizations. OhmyNews has opted for a commercial road and has been involved in a market competition with mainstream journalism. Its only original advantage lies in the content of dissemination – the citizen journalism that has obvious characteristics. When mainstream journalism begun to introduce citizen news reports, the advantages of citizen journalism sites become less obvious. The problem is that commercialization makes citizen journalism lose their original style. OhmyNews early news coverage was welcomed by readers was because it sent a different voice from traditional media. From the continuous strengthening of commercialization, pressure from the advertisers and the audience marketl increases, the site's editorial policy will also change. The so-called citizen news reports on the site eventually transformed into a poor version of mainstream journalism.
Under the premise of capitalism, material labor has lost its central role, the fundamental force that sustains journalists' continuing writing is by no means immediate interests or novelty, but their civic spirit and sense of participation. When the people have a strong sense of civic and social responsibility, they become a real citizen, they will make disseminate the news as a responsibility, and consciously joined the ranks of citizen journalists.
23
Ying Si