Citizen Journalism: The New Luther

If there is a new Martin Luther in this Digital Reformation, it is Oh Yeon-ho.  Luther said every man is a priest.  Oh declared “every citizen is a reporter.”  Blogging gave citizens public diaries.  Oh gave them their own newspaper.

In 2000, Oh and three colleagues started a politically motivated online daily newspaper, OhMyNews.  Oh said he and other South Korean liberals were dissatisfied with the mainstream Korean press, but had too little financial backing to start a conventional newspaper.  Oh resorted to what he called “guerilla methods” - using volunteer reporters and posting the material on the Internet instead of printing it.

I wanted to open a place of fair competition where people who wanted to share news with one another could do so through the Internet.  I wanted to establish a culture where the quality of news determined whether it won or lost.  I wanted to start a tradition free of newspaper company elitism were news was evaluated based on quality, regardless of whether it came from a major newspaper, a local reporter, an educated journalist or a neighborhood housewife.  I wanted to realize through the Internet the motto “Every citizen is a reporter,” something that couldn’t be done through printed newspapers.  So I decided to make the plunge into the sea of the Internet, even though I feared that which was different from what I was accustomed.

Oh recruited 727 “citizen reporters” to write the news, which was edited and processed by four professional journalists.  Few in or out of the journalism profession foresaw the phenomenal success of Oh’s unusual publication strategy. The “staff” numbers have since grown to 75 professional journalists and 60,000 citizen journalists in Korea alone and thousands of other contributors around the world.  OhMyNews is also now profitable and monthly unique visitors have jumped from 600 at launch to more than 3 million.  It also has an English-language version that is popular worldwide.

What differentiated OhmyNews from other blogs and other user-generated content is that it consolidated material from a variety of writers and published it on a platform with much greater distribution then a single blog or personal website.  It used a variant of the traditional newspaper circulation strategy to compete against traditional newspapers.

OhmyNews was strongly political at its launch.  The Korean media industry was dominated by conservative newspapers backing the conservative government.  Oh’s liberal paid staff wrote the main daily political coverage, but thousands of “citizen reporters” who were paid a token amount for each story provided the bulk of the content.  To the surprise of the media establishment, the tactic swayed public opinion in Korea and was credited for helping elect human rights lawyer Roh Moo Hyun president in 2002.

But OhmyNews came into its own with what Oh called “life stories.”  He was especially moved by a December 2003 story that simply began ““The first snow fell in our neighborhood, too.”

Oh and his colleagues discovered that by breaking down the formal structure of news writing, interest by everyday readers increased.  As he explained:

Breaking article formalism and “every citizen a reporter” were two sides of the same coin.  If the time had come for every citizen to be a reporter, why was it necessary to continue to follow the same article writing formula set by the professional journalists?  Moreover, these formula were created for the era of the printed newspaper, which had been constrained by time and place.

It’s back to that priesthood of journalism.  Like Luther, Oh found that those who claimed to have the direct pipeline to Truth often have little justification for the rules they establish.

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