26 червня у вівторок вилітаємо з Дімою взяти участь в OhMyNews Citizen Reporters' Forum 2007. Україна названа однією з країн, де громадянська журналістика розвивається найбільш динамічно.
Нижче викладаю текст доповіді, з якою виступатиму.
Dear Ladies and Gentlemen, dear friends, dear colleagues!
My name is Serhiy Danylenko. I came from Ukraine, where I work as editor-in-chief of HighWay online newspaper.
Few words about my country and Ukrainian media landscape.
Ukraine is a country located in Eastern Europe. Ukraine borders on European Union and it is a primary task of our foreign policy to join the European community and become a member of the European Union and NATO.
Ukraine has a population of 46 mln people, so it is one of the most populated countries in Europe.
However, only 2% of our population have Internet access.
Important detail. 38% of Internet users enjoy broadband connection and this number is growing. It means that very soon Ukraine will solve the problem of low speed dial-up connection. In fact, almost all Ukrainian web-projects, which are being developed at the moment, are aimed at users with broadband connection.
Online advertising market volume is $ 14 mln. Most of it drops to media advertising. Context advertising is not so popular yet.
To compare. Neighbor country Poland has a population of 38 mln people and advertising market volume $101 mln.
So we can say that Ukraine is a country with a huge potential. I would even say that Ukraine is one of the most promising markets in the world.
Online market hasn’t shaped yet and there are plenty of opportunities for new projects as well as for foreign companies to enter the market.
Now I shall tell You about what we did.
Me and my friend Dmytro Dubilet studied at the Institute of International Relations. There we used to publish local newspaper distributed among students. Then we decided to make something bigger and start our own newspaper. Being fond of information technologies we went with an idea of online newspaper, where readers would influence journalists as much as possible. It took us a year to write a code of the site. Web-site was designed and programmed by Dmytro. I think it’s fantastic case, since Dmytro isn’t a programmer. He just bought a book about PHP and MySQL, read it and created a site.
There are some old scripts written by Dmytro that our programmers still afraid to deal with, since they don’t know, how they function.
On 5 August 2005 we went online. From the very beginning we decided that Highway would be a profitable business project on the one hand and will carry out a noble mission of honest and interesting media on the other.
In a year we had 2000 registered users, which is quite a large number in Ukrainian Internet. We also became listed among TOP-25 Internet media with 15.000 unique visitors per day. Highway was the only TOP mass-media web-site completely created by its users. And it started being profitable thanks to online advertising.
In September 2006 we got investments from Ukrainian Media Holding, which is now a major shareholder.
Now I shall tell You in brief, how does Highway web-site function.
Any registered user is welcome to publish an article, a news item, a picture or a poem. All published information immediately appears in the section called Live. Registered users put marks to what they read and in the end of the day we have a rating of published information. Our editor looks through the rating and decides what articles proceed to the first page. These get $ 0,2 - $15 reward depending on their position in rating.
Highway has a distinguished feature I’d like to mention. Highway is not only a newspaper, it’s also a social network, which unites professional journalists with citizen reporters. 13 of registered users are professional journalists. They use Highway to find new contacts or story ideas and to publish information they can’t publish in their own media.
Citizen reporters work and communicate hand-in-hand with professional journalists. In such a way they learn how to write good articles, they make new friends and even find a permanent job in printed media.
Editors of printed media often use Highway to find journalists and offer them a permanent job or give a freelance task.
So Highway web-site is not only about content. Communication and socializing is very important part of our project. Highway gives the possibility to comment on the articles and pictures, rate the comments, exchange private messages, search each other’s profiles, work together on articles before they’re published, communicate in forum, participate in rating system, compile a friend list, set up start page and plenty of other options.
Thus money is not a main driver for people to participate in Highway project. It’s a reward, which makes socializing more exciting.
Concerning business model.
Highway makes money by online advertising. We also develop a recruiting service and plan to start selling additional services to users.
And the last point I would like to dwell on. In my opinion, user created content and the culture of participation change the nature of what we think to be “valuable”.
People publish articles, communicate and socialize not for money.
Media companies invest in user created content not because it allows them to get an immediate cash flow and profit.
My friend Evgeny Morozov told once: “Internet makes people more humane”.
We start to value communication and to value UCC platforms and web-sites, since they let us express ourselves and grow intellectually and spiritually.
