The End of 20th Century Journalism

Thank you for your note about Ohmynews, Howard, thanks for pointing me to read more about OhmyNews founder and CEO Yeon Ho.

Yeon has adressed the 2004 World Association of Newspapers Conference in Istanbul, Turkey, with a very interesting case study of Ohmynews, here are some quotes:

"The traditional newspaper inherently has two limits: time and space. That's why only professional journalists can write articles for the papers.

But Internet media can overcome these two barriers. In some ways, the Internet also has time and space limits, but in others the Internet has no time and space limits. That's why a citizen reporter can participate in the news reporting.

By means of the Internet, OhmyNews created a two-way journalism. The readers are no longer passive. They can be reporters anytime they want."

"We started OhmyNews with 727 citizen reporters, now we have about 33,000. "

"In March, there was a huge candlelight demonstration in the center of Seoul. Two hundred thousand people were gathered and demanded that President Roh not be impeached.

Twenty staff reporters and several citizen reporters were all there to cover the demonstration vividly with the combination text-photo-video and we published a special edition of the weekly paper.

We broadcast the event live on OhmyTV and updated text articles every 30 minutes during the six-hour demonstration.

About four hundred thousand OhmyNews readers participated in the demonstration online, and over 85,000 comments on the one issue were recorded on our site.

With this kind of coverage, OhmyNews is challenging and changing the traditional media formula of how to write, how to edit. "

"Yes, in the media market there has been a media power which says "this is standard, follow me". The standards of 20th century journalism have been created and controlled by professional newspaper journalists.

But these standards are challenged by the Internet: challenged by new journalists of the new space, they are called netizens or citizen reporters.

They challenged the traditional media logic of who is a reporter, what is news, what is the best news style, and what is newsworthy.

Because the old standards were challenged, the media power of traditional newspapers has declined. In Korea, we have seen a power shift in the media market, which was originally dominated by conservative newspapers."

Amazing. I stored this note in "Journalism and Blogging" even though Ohmynews is not a blog but I guess this is OK as people writing blogs are also "Citizens Reporters".