Citizens are the media in S. Korea

Her article was posted online under the headline: "Daddy's Depressed, Son's Taking Tests, and I'm Worried." Readers poured in with empathy and advice. Since then, the 45-year-old's writings of ordinary life have become so popular that readers have clicked thousands of dollars into a cyber tip jar.

Kim is a writer for OhmyNews, a free online news service that has been held out by some as the future of journalism. Amateur reporters across South Korea submit some 200 news and feature articles a day, which are fact-checked and edited by a professional staff of about 65 at its newsroom in Seoul.

Although traditional newspapers and magazines around the world are cutting jobs amid declining circulation and a shift toward the Internet, OhmyNews continues to recruit. It currently has a reporting corps of 50,000. The company's motto, posted outside its crammed office in central Seoul, is a big help-wanted sign: "Every citizen can be a reporter."

The experiment has been lauded by the Economist and other publications. OhmyNews' founder and chief executive, Oh Yeon-ho, a onetime writer for a dissident magazine, has traveled the globe extolling the virtues of "participatory citizens' journalism" and offering a new business model for a struggling industry. "I find some universal applicability in the OhmyNews model," says the wiry 42-year-old.

But as the news service has matured, a bit of the sheen has worn off. The headline on OhmyNews' story could be "Business Is Depressed, Readership Is Down and Backers Are Worried."

After making a big splash during South Korea's 2002 presidential elections, the company lost money last year on revenue of about $6 million, most of it from ads. Its readership, as measured by page views on the Internet, has fallen to about 1.5 million a day, from a peak of 20 million five years ago.

Last summer OhmyNews expanded into Japan, with $11 million of financing from Tokyo-based investment giant Softbank Corp., but neither that site nor the English-language international site has come close to matching OhmyNews' performance in South Korea.