OhMyNews.com
This blog is based on:
Chapter 7: “OhmyNews in South Korea” in Asia’s Media Innovators, Konrad Adenaueur Foundation, Singapore & the YouTube Clip above
According to a segment on the Listening Post on YouTube, 89 per cent of households in South Korea have broadband compared to just 50 per cent of households in the US.
In fact, according to this weeks reading, South Korea has the world’s highest number of broadband connections per capita.
The internet is interactive and more people are telling their stories and blogging online. Therefore, it would make sense to have a news site based on citizen journalism.
The founder and CEO of OhMyNews, Oh Yeon-ho, did just that.
He used the idea that “every citizen is a reporter” to launch OhMyNews.com in South Korea, a website that publishes citizen journalism.
What I do not understand is how this website did not fall into the pitfalls of just being another news outlet, especially with the large array of media available to the South Koreans.
However, it seems that Oh’s intention of creating the site to “change society” and “…wasn’t created just for money” has attracted people to report the news.
It could also be because of the country’s history with media censorship and reporters arrests that the country was in need of news based website such as OhMyNews.
OhMyNews.com was launched in February 2000 and already boasts 60,000 citizen reporters worldwide. That is amazing!
It is good to see that Oh wants to combine the best of both traditional and citizen journalism.
The internet is a place of interaction and OhMyNews offers this chance for people to interact – to contribute to the world of news.
Nevertheless, it seems that OhMyNews are doing something to stop the perceived idea that citizen journalism is unprofessional.
Most of the 200 stories submitted each day are not published due to bad sentence structure, deemed as not newsworthy or have to be checked first for legitimacy.
But I do not think that it is the money that attracts people to become a citizen journalist.
OhMyNews only offers up to US $50 for a main top story.
While fifty-dollars does not does not seem that much, publishers are also scanning the site for regular contributors, which could be worth while in the end.
