Back in May, Mercury News tech columnist Dan Gillmor wrote a really interesting piece about a new brand of journalism that’s taking root in South Korea. As he puts it, "The main concept is that every citizen can be a reporter".

In October this year, an InTheseTimes article by Howard Rheingold discusses what he calls ‘the new news’.

And this is what the Net is really all about - p2p to the nth degree where data are being chanelled into a mind-boggling array of online media, all of which allow citizens to report and which force the traditional news sources to realize they no longer have the last word.

Now read on >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>

A new brand of journalism is taking root in South Korea
By Dan Gillmor - Mercury News

SEOUL - Lee Bong-Ryul has a day job as an engineer at a semiconductor company. In his spare time, he’s helping to shape tomorrow’s journalism.

Lee is an active ‘citizen-reporter’ for OhmyNews, an online news service. Only 4 years old, the publication has already shaken up the South Korean journalism and political establishments while attracting an enormous audience.

OhmyNews is transforming the 20th century’s journalism-as-lecture model, where organizations tell the audience what the news is and the audience either buys it or doesn’t, into something vastly more bottom-up, interactive and democratic.

The influence of OhmyNews is substantial, and expanding. It’s credited with having helped elect the nation’s current president, Roh Moo Hyun, who ran as a reformer. Roh granted his first post-election interview to the publication, snubbing the three major conservative newspapers that have dominated the print-journalism scene for years.

Even taxi drivers who don’t have time for newspapers have heard of OhmyNews. The site draws millions of visitors daily. Advertisers are supporting both the Korean-language Web site (www.ohmy news.com) and a weekly print edition, and the operation has been profitable in recent months, according to its chief executive and founder, Oh Yeon-Ho.

Oh is a 38-year-old former writer for progressive magazines. With a staff of about 50 and legions of ‘citizen-reporter’ contributors — more than 26,000 have signed up, and more than 15,000 have published stories under their bylines — Oh and his colleagues are creating something entirely new.

‘The main concept is that every citizen can be a reporter,’ he says. ‘We changed the concept of the reporter.’

The old way meant becoming a professional journalist and getting a press card — a credentialed and somewhat elevated position in South Korean society. (I know that must sound bizarre to readers in the United States, where we journalists enjoy roughly the same public esteem as politicians and used-car salesmen.)

The new way, Oh says, is that ‘a reporter is the one who has the news and who is trying to inform others.’

The paper’s citizen-reporters go into issues that the mainstream media haven’t covered, says Jeong Woon-Hyeon, the chief editor.

The site posts about 70 percent of the roughly 200 items submitted each day, after staff editors look at the stories. Postings work on a hierarchy corresponding to their place on the page; the lower the headline appears, the less important or interesting the editors consider it. The higher and more newsworthy the story, the more the freelance contributor gets paid.

The idea isn’t entirely new. News organizations have long used stringers, who contribute freelance articles.

What’s so different here is that anyone can sign up, and it’s not difficult to get published. The Web means space for news is essentially unlimited, and OhmyNews welcomes contributions from just about anyone.

The real-people nature of the contributors lends further appeal to the site. The citizen-reporters do cover politics, economy, culture, arts and science — the usual subjects you’ll find in newspapers — but they tend to focus more on personally oriented issues like education, job conditions and the environment.

While about 85 percent of the online edition is written by the citizen-reporters, about 90 percent of the weekly print edition is written by the staff.

OhmyNews reflects its bosses’ passion for going beyond the conservative papers’ constrained view of the world. By several accounts, its coverage of events such as the death of two schoolgirls crushed by a U.S. Army vehicle in an accident last summer has forced the hand of mainstream media that were downplaying the story. Protest demonstrations after that incident evolved into nationwide anger against the United States and a profoundly nationalist fervor that helped elect Roh.

Oh and Jeong reject the perception that OhmyNews is somehow linked to the new government. Clearly, though, they have vastly more in common politically with the semi-reformist regime than the one it replaced, just as they are poles apart from the mass media that were widely seen as supporters of Roh’s predecessors.

Oh’s rise from underground-magazine writer to powerful media figure has any number of ironies.

One is that the government he disliked was instrumental in wiring the nation for high-speed data access, creating the conditions that ultimately gave OhmyNews an opening. In this wired nation, more than two-thirds of households are connected to the Internet, most with high-speed links. The Internet is an always-on part of everyday life, not an afterthought.

There’s the way he came to realize that he should start OhmyNews. He went to the United States from 1997 to 1999 to get a master’s degree at Regent University in Virginia. The school’s president was Pat Robertson, the evangelist and right-wing political figure.

To know America, Oh says he was told by a journalist friend, you have to know how the conservative right operates. In Robertson’s case, part of the operation was counteracting what conservatives saw (and continue to see) as a liberal-oriented mainstream press. Robertson’s method was to start his own media outlets.

Regent offered media courses. ‘I learned their techniques,’ he says. ‘But my approach is quite different.’

In one course, students’ homework was to create a new media organization, at least on paper. Oh’s imaginary company was the genesis of OhmyNews. (’I got an A-plus,’ he says wryly.)

The vision was to use the Internet, which was then growing like crazy, to tap the power of average people who, Oh strongly believed, didn’t back South Korea’s government and weren’t represented by the conservative media companies that controlled about 80 percent of daily circulation.

OhmyNews’ ambitions aren’t limited to mere words. It runs video Webcasting services and plans to expand its multimedia presence. Someday, citizen-reporters could be contributing video reports, not just text, in a dazzling, multidirectional sharing of information.

Oh and his colleagues know that the interactive nature of the medium extends far beyond OhmyNews’ appeals for contributions from citizen-reporters. Each story has a link to a comments page. Readers can, and do, post comments ranging from supportive to harsh, and they can vote on whether they approve or disapprove of specific comments.

Before joining OhmyNews, Lee was posting politically oriented items to several online bulletin boards, getting little if any response.

OhmyNews, he says, changed the equation. Here, at last, was a publication that reflected some of his views on politics and society — and that was glad to publish what he wrote.

He doesn’t do it for the money. Stories that make the OhmyNews equivalent of the front page earn him about $20, the top rate. He gets commensurately less for stories that run lower on the page and figures he makes between $50 and $100 a month in freelance payments — not a pittance but hardly a fortune.

Lee has no ambitions to be a professional writer. ‘I don’t think I’m qualified,’ he says. But he believes he gets, on balance, a greater response for the kinds of stories he writes — about regular people’s lives — than some of the professional journalism that runs in the newspapers and on the site every day.

The easy coexistence of the amateurs and professionals will, soon enough, seem natural. Publications like OhmyNews will pop up everywhere, because they make sense, combining the best of old and new journalistic forms.

OhmyNews is an experiment in tomorrow. So far, it’s looking like a brilliant one.

=================

From the Screen to the Streets
By Howard Rheingold - InTheseTimes
It has taken 10 years of talk about ?new media? for a critical mass to understand that every computer desktop, and now every pocket, is a worldwide printing press, broadcasting station, place of assembly, and organizing tool?and to learn how to use that infrastructure to affect change.

Previous technologies allowed users only to communicate one-to-one (telephones) or few-to-many (broadcast and print media). Mobile and deskbound media such as blogs, listservs and social networking sites allow for many-to-many communication. This provides opportunities and problems for progressive political activists in three key areas: Gathering and disseminating alternative and more democratic news; creating virtual public spheres where citizens debate the issues that concern democratic societies; and organizing collective political action.

The new news
Blogs and moblogs, such as the international network of Independent Media Centers, South Korea’s influential OhMyNews and MoveOn.org?s misleader.org are signs of what San Jose Mercury-News columnist Dan Gillmor calls an emerging ‘we journalism.’ Each of these sites offers up-to-the-minute news alerts, provided by a combination of citizen-reporters and trained staff. While the owners and administrators of such sites range widely - from passionate individuals to collectives to upstart nonprofits - these blogs are markedly more democratic than their corporate-run, top-down brethren.

Internal and external forces, however, threaten to undermine ‘we journalism’ before its impact is fully realized.

Misinformation, disinformation, incredulity and magical thinking all are problems on the supply side of these new reporting modes. Aggregators of blog postings’which rank blog listings by popularity, similar to Google’s page rank technology’ already serve as a filter for this flood of amateur journalism. And reputation systems, filters and syndication services also could develop into useful tools for assessing the veracity of information sites. But political activists and those who sponsor progressive projects also have a role: For ?we journalism? to have long-term credibility and lasting impact, progressives must fund, staff and promote media literacy - teaching users to create and consume this new journalism.

Activists also have a role in turning back corporate attacks that seek to privatize the Internet by regulating content and limiting amateurs - ability to produce cultural works that compete with media conglomerates.

Today, a small number of broadband Internet providers, such as Comcast and Viacom, are pushing for regulations that would enable them to pick and choose the content that travels over their part of the network. The courts also are coming to bear in this fight, as companies work to extend copyright far beyond its original intent and establish digital rights schemes that make it difficult to produce or distribute digital content not authorized by the entertainment industry.

The consolidation of media ownership in the hands of a small number of individuals or cartels - who exchange political funding for legislative and regulatory favors - is being fought by organizations such as the Electronic Frontier Foundation. But activists who have not been involved in technology or media issues need to join in this battle, because communication media under dispute are profoundly political tools. In coming decades, Internet-based media will exert more and more influence over what people know and believe and how they can organize and assemble for collective action.

The electronic town square
Network TV news and talk radio are hardly examples of the reasoned debate philosopher Jürgen Habermas had in mind when he described the public sphere as central to the life of a democracy. Indeed, they are an example of the manipulation of public opinion via popular media that he warned about.

Online and many-to-many technologies can shift the locus of the public sphere from a small number of powerful media owners to entire populations. The value of Internet discourse in this effort has not been proven, however, perhaps because the literacy around this use of media has not had sufficient time to mature - the World Wide Web is barely 10 years old, and has been gaining uninitiated users each year.

Now, for better and worse, citizens are arguing with each other?with varying degrees of civility - and sometimes marshaling evidence to buttress logic in countless blogs, listservs, chat rooms and message boards. The quality and level of know-how and the willingness of a significant portion of the population to adopt and self-enforce online etiquette will determine whether reasoned debate will flourish online or be drowned out by surlier forms of argument. Activists and journalists must take a leading role in determining the success of this outcome by wielding these technologies skillfully and purposively.

Organizing collective action
Only recently have political activists successfully used many-to-many media to mobilize large-scale collective action such as street demonstrations and protests, electoral fundraising, get-out-the-vote campaigns and legislative lobbying. Technologies and methodologies are developing very rapidly at this point, and so are the political moves to neutralize them.

In the United States, Howard Dean?s presidential campaign has mobilized the self-organizing capabilities of blogs. Meetup.com and online fundraising propelled this underdog to front-runner status. If Dean wins, 2004 will be the watershed political event for the Internet that the Kennedy-Nixon debates were for television in 1960. In a few years, MoveOn.org also has grown from a Web site protesting the Clinton impeachment to an effective lobbying movement that influences legislation and elections. MoveOn.org played an important part in the recent effort to lobby Congress to overturn the FCC?s deregulation of media cross-ownership.

Innovations aren’t confined to the United States. Neither ex-President Estrada of the Philippines nor newly elected President Roh in South Korea would be in their present positions if smart mobs had not worked so effectively. In the Philippines, a million citizens used SMS to organize street demonstrations that helped topple the Estrada regime. In South Korea, the cyber-generation, seeing their favored candidate losing in exit polls, used a Web site to organize a get-out-the-vote campaign involving 800,000 personal e-mails and uncounted SMS messages, turning the tide in the election?s final hours.

Activists should now concentrate their efforts in this last sphere?technology-amplified collective action. The above examples are just the beginning. The capabilities of media are multiplying, the number of people who use their mobile phones as Internet connections and text-messaging media is growing explosively. And activists are only beginning to experiment with ways to multiply their ability to organize collective action.

Influencing elections and legislation is the sine qua non of effectiveness. In the next few years, peer-to-peer, self-organized, citizen-centric movements enabled by smart mob media will either demonstrate real political influence, be successfully contained by those whose power they threaten, or recede as a utopian myth of days gone by. What progressives know now, and what we do soon, will decide which of those scenarios unfolds.

This entry was posted on Thursday, November 20th, 2003 at 1:31 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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