Citizens report… in Korea
: I’ve been waiting for this for a long time: OhMyNews, the amazing citizen-powered news site in South Korea, now has an English-language edition. From the welcome exactly four years ago:
Four years ago today, Oh Yeon Ho, CEO and the founder of OhmyNews logged on OhmyNews server and declared the birth of new journalism. It was the first step of saying a final goodbye to 20th century journalism….
Born in the spring of the new millennium, OhmyNews declares it is making a complete departure from the media culture of the 20th century. We are going to change the culture of how news is produced, distributed, and consumed, all at one time.
Every citizen’s a reporter. Journalists aren’t some exotic species, they’re everyone who seeks to take new developments, put them into writing, and share them with others….
Our weapon is the proposition that “every citizen is a reporter.” We intend to achieve a “news alliance of news guerillas.” We will be unfolding a second NGO (news guerilla organization) movement.
We have three main tactics.
-Abolish the threshold to being a reporter.
-Break down the set formula for news articles.
-Demolish all walls that separate media….
OhmyNews is changing the culture of news consumption. Readers will be able to add their views to each and every article. And for the first time anywhere, readers will have the authority to determine much about how much news guerillas are paid for their articles.
More than anything else, OhmyNews is changing the way people think about what’s newsworthy….
*OhmyNews currently has over 35 dedicated staff reporters. On any given day, more than 30,000 citizen reporters post their stories on regular basis.
Finally, with some of OhMy in English, we can learn from their remarkable success.
Here’s a NY Times story on OhMy. And here’s a Dan Gillmor column about it. [via SmartMobs]
