Seek and you shall find….Heard that before? Well I have loads! I’m keen to demonstrate there is already an active number of ‘crowd sourced’ projects in existence and that with a collective drive to succeed you can achieve anything. Ohmynews is an Korean online newspaper totally written by contributors in Korea.

There is talk in blogsphere that country specific conditions made this viable and that this could not be replicated say in the USA or the UK. Hmmm I dunno about that, but I do concede that in Korea there was a total distrust of the media, politicians and access to the internet was easy. To me at least, it does not sound too dissimilar to the western world.

However with that said Ohmynews secured funding of an $11 million dollar investment from a Japanese bank in Feb 2006, with plans to launch the same newspaper model in Japan. Latest reports state that the Japanese model has not taken off as in Korea and that profits have been declining. The established press attribute this to aggressive competitive advertising and country specific conditions that no longer apply today.

So with both sides of the equation you can make a balanced conclusion, but in the information age surely access to data is where the power base lies. Typically this is in the hands of a few media moguls and not the masses. Ohmynews has approximately 40,000 contributers come journalists. My understanding is, there are some 90 odd full-time editors who control the flow of copy coming into Ohmynews headquarters.

Many argue that this model will not and cannot work profitably, because since its launch in 2002 we would have seen a new and successful type of journalism by now. I believe the flaw in this thought process is that Ohmynews was born out of necessity and not for profits. For example if you set up a charity, your drive and goals are to serve your public and pay the bills. If you set up a public limited company, then your geared to increase revenue, drive down costs and raise the share price.

What interests me the most is why we cannot have both? A ‘crowd sourced’ online paper that aims to report the news and make a profit. The contributors can be rewarded for their journalistic skills whilst maintaining high standards off any conventional paper. The Ohmynews model needs tweaking not reinventing.