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Oh Yeon-Ho firmly believes in the slogan that hangs
over the door of his office: “Every citizen is a reporter.”
It’s a motto that has driven
him to create one of the world’s biggest and most influential
“citizen journalism” websites, OhmyNews.com, and to build an
army of amateur reporters tens of thousands strong.
“‘Every citizen is a
reporter’ is no longer a slogan but a reality,” Oh, 42, said in
a recent interview at his Seoul office.
When he founded his Web page in
February 2000 as one of the world’s first outlets for “citizen
journalism,” he had only four staff.
Now his 50,000 reporters are
backed by 80 staff and churn out hundreds of stories in South Korea.
Another 3,000 reporters are registered in Japan, plus 2,500
elsewhere, he said.
“They come from virtually all
walks of society,” Oh says of his contributors. “School kids,
housewives, policemen, novelists, doctors and even politicians.”
OhmyNews is now regarded as South
Korea’s most influential news website, competing with conventional
media outlets and helping change the concept of journalism not just
in South Korea but across the world.
“The citizen journalism
pioneered by OhmyNews in South Korea is changing the paradigm of
mass communications where media outlets unilaterally set what the
news is and feed it to the general public,” said Kim Byoung-Cheol,
a journalism professor at Cyber University of Foreign Studies in
Seoul.
“Now, citizens are both the
producers and the consumers of the news. The era of elite
journalists monopolizing the news is over.
“Citizen journalism is not a
transient phenomenon but a big global trend in line with the
blooming democratization,” he said.
Oh couldn’t agree more, and
says his confidence is backed up by the numbers.
If a story becomes really big, up
to two million people a day will log onto the site, up from the
normal daily traffic of 500,000 to one million hits, Oh said.
Amateur journalists produce up to
200 stories each day for OhmyNews, some 80 percent of the total, and
even though they receive relatively little money for their work—up
to 20,000 won (about $20) per article—the stories keep pouring in.
 --AFP
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