In 2000, South Korean Oh Yeon-Ho launched OhMyNews.com – the first news agency run entirely by citizen journalists. He wanted to rid the news industry of elitism and realised that due to the decentralised nature of the internet, it cannot be controlled.
Oh Yeon-ho, courtesy of Wired.
When citizens join, they sign a Code Of Ethics and Reporters Agreement. Contributors can earn money for their stories, depending on it’s importance.
OhMyNews acts on the thought that every citizen can be a reporter. This gives a difference perspective on the news to the world. If one person is interested then perhaps another is interested in that news too, and removes public discourse control from traditional media gatekeepers.
The following is from the OhMyNews.com citizen journalism conference:
Two quotes I completely agree with from the video are there is an “expectation of readers that they can interact with the people telling them their news” and “If you don’t like the news, report some of your own.”
As South Korea has the highest rate of broadband connections per capita, OhMyNews has empowered information hungry citizens that want to share and created a community.
I am increasingly discovering that in this media landscape it is easy to suffer from information overload, so people are becoming increasingly savvy at filtering out the news they don’t want and finding exactly the information that they do want to learn about. OhMyNews aids this search.
If you would like to learn more about OhMyNews, click here.
