Comment Articles

Citizen-reporters make the best of both worlds

Rupert Goodwins ZDNet.co.uk

Published: 19 May 2003 14:23 BST

Referendums are everywhere. We'll soon find out whether Tony Blair will be asking us to vote on the euro; meanwhile, it's a full-time job these days watching television and deciding which celebrity to eject, which poem is finest or whether surfing horses make a better advert than potato-eating Martians. We can email, text or phone our choices in from the sofa, while the government is dead keen on introducing similar electronic voting for less important decisions such as national and local elections. Truly, the voice of the people is loud across the land.

Yet we've never felt more detached from the mechanisms of state. Everyone knows that the euro vote will only happen when Tony's sure of the outcome, and the biggest demonstrations the country has ever seen made not a scrap of difference to the Iraq adventure. It's a commonplace that democracy doesn't work without an informed electorate, so perhaps some of this cynicism is reflected in the slow demise of the newspaper industry -- felt most keenly by those parts of the press that take themselves most seriously as organs of truth. People don't trust journalists, and it's hard to escape the feeling that a lot of the media repays the compliment.

Our new technologies were supposed to remove these sorts of barriers, but attitudes harden instead: online media discussion groups turn into cliques, suspicious of outsiders and proud of their prejudices. In the US, the world's poster child for the glorious Internet revolution, it's even worse: patriotism and sectarianism are the order of the day, while the old leaders of the traditional high-tone press are in spasms of self-doubt. The New York Times' recent public self-flagellation over its rogue reporter has been met with raucous laughter, while huge stories go unreported. For anyone who believes in the necessity of a healthy, diverse and sceptical press as a guard against abuses of power, these are worrying times. But where to look?

Try South Korea. A phenomenally successful experiment in new media -- it actually makes money -- called OhmyNews has been blossoming for four years. As an exclusively Korean-language publication, it's remained beneath the radar in the Western media (Thanks to Dan Gillmore of the Mercury News for pointing it out) But it's making the agenda in its home country, where it is widely held to have helped the election of a reformist presidential candidate. Like all good news sources, it comes as both a weekly paper and constantly updated Web site, with the weekly publication using the best parts of the site. But unlike any other news source, it's largely written by its readers or 'citizen-reporters' as they're known. Anyone can submit contributions to the Web site; the articles the people write are scrutinised by the permanent staff and rated before publication. Of the 200 or so submitted daily, around 140 make it onto the site.