Via dotJournalism: Korean news site OhmyNews has opened the site to citizen contributions from around the world. The five-year-old news aggregator site currently has around 37,000 reporters from all over Korea and recently shot to fame with its work with electing the country’s reformist president. An English version of the site, OhmyNews International, was launched last year and is expected to attract online news contributions from all over the world. The updated plan includes a new login system that can monitor the number of hits and also enable readers to send money to reporters for good stories. Contributors who want to visit Korea are asked to watch out for a planned conference for global citizen reporters to be held in Seoul in early July.

Via the LA Times: Debate as much as we may about whether bloggers enjoy the same privileges as journalists, they are here to stay, so get on with it, said Rory O’Connor, president of Globalvision, an independent international media company. “No one owns journalism,” Jeff Jarvis wrote on BuzzMachine. “It is not an official act, a certified act, an expert act, a proprietary act. Anyone can do journalism. Everyone does. Some do it better than others, of course. But everyone does it.” O’Connor also noted that even though bloggers in some cases can be irresponsible and misleading, it was the possible lowering of journalistic standards and more Dan Rather-like discoveries that mainstream journalists are worried about. Blogging is clearly not going anywhere so traditional media are being urged to give up the rather worn-out debate and focus more on “how the newly transformed news environment can best function.”

From ZDNet via CNet News: For all bloggers who contribute valuable material to Web sites and get nothing for it – things are changing. GetLocalNews.com, a nationwide network of 6,000 local news sites, is poised to share its advertising revenue with its freelance writers. The amount generated in ad revenue, which is determined by each story’s page views, is to be shared in equally by the company and its writers, working out to 2 dollars to 5 dollars per 1,000 page views. All writers who earn 25 dollars or more will be sent quarterly checks. The move is expected to motivate more contributions, increase traffic and improve the quality of writing. Steve Outing of the Poynter Institute journalism school said it was a trend that could be the next big wave in the sea change that online news is experiencing. The news site posts around 4000 stories everyday, mostly submitted by volunteers around the country.