Week 5: Quinn, S. (2008). Chapter 7: “OhmyNews in South Korea” in Asia’s Media Innovaters, Konrad Adenaueur Foundation, Singapore.
Blogging is a trend that has grown in leaps and bounds over the last five years. Citizen journalism and OhmyNews are a new product of the blogging era. People are now considering, how can I make money from the Internet?
One of the obvious answers is blogging. There are a few websites that offer money for blogs that attract a lot of interest. Darren Rowse, from ProBlogger, writes, ‘I’ve long advised that bloggers seeking to make money from blogging spread their interests across multiple revenue streams so as not to put all their eggs in one basket.’ (Taken from http://www.problogger.net/archives/2005/12/06/how-bloggers-make-money-from-blogs/)
A blogging site similar to OhmyNews is Orble.com. 
According to the About Orble page, a user can ‘earn anything from a few cents to $100 or more per week’. Orble has three levels of blogs. There are ‘regular blogs’, in diary-like format; there are ‘domain blogs’ that have a dedicated domain name (usually written on a particular subject); and there are ‘promoted blogs’ – Orble will support these by providing training and promoting the work. (Information from http://www.orble.com/about/)
Citizen journalism (such as 
) differs because it focuses more on traditional journalism. OhmyNews has ethics and guidelines the writers have to follow, whereas Orble is a blogging community – open to almost anything.
The payment methods are similar though. Each site pays according to ‘eyeballs’ – or reader interest. The more clicks the story/page gets, the more money one eventually earns. If a user took Rowse’s advice, one could make a living through up keeping 50 blogs.
