Citizen Journalists

The Nashville Scene's editorial in this week's edition begins:

If you want a glimpse into the future of journalism, you'd be advised to visit a Web site out of South Korea (www.OhmyNews.com). Granted, you won't understand a word, but you'll get the drift.The site was begun about five years ago—as best we can tell from various news sources including Wired and the San Jose Mercury News—when a South Korean investigative reporter named Oh Yeon-ho got fed up with his job and quit. Angered by what he saw as the conservative bias of the major media outlets, Oh decided to start his own newspaper. But he had no money.

So he went the low-budget route. He put his publication on the Web (hence no printing cost) and told anyone who wanted to write for it that they could (hence very low editorial costs). Amazingly, the thing took off.

Today, some 26,000 so-called "citizen journalists" supply content for the site. As the hundreds of stories pour in every day, a staff of editors reviews them for accuracy. The success of the site is self-evident: it has some 2 million daily readers. Were such a site in the United States to claim the same proportion of our population, it would have 12 million daily readers. Observers agree the site has become one of the most influential news organizations in South Korea. In the last presidential election, it is said that OhmyNews played a huge role in electing the country's new, progressive president. (After the election, in fact, the new president's first interview was with OhmyNews.)

It goes on to mention blogs, the Northwest Voice, and goskokie. Goskokie was an experiment by journalism students at Medill School of Journalism and apparently ended as a going concern when the class ended. And, to give you an idea of how little some folks understand about this phenomenon, see this article where "a spokesman" says it's been replaced by the librarian-created Skokie.org which, "works like the goskokie site should." Huh? Skokie.org is a typical municipal info/booster site that has nothing to do with citizen journalism. Clueless.

Here's a Wired News story on Northwest Voice that mentions OhmyNews