You be the reporter
Tired of media concentration? Take a lesson from South Korea
BY Arthur Johnson
Photography by Kwon Woo Sung
The death watch for the daily newspaper has now reached a great old age. Beginning with the widespread popularity of radio, people have been making confident predictions about the imminent demise of The Globe and Mail, The New York Times and all their kind large and small for some 80 years.
But old habits die hard, and none more so than the ritual unfurling of a big, unwieldy wad of cheap paper and runny ink with its all too predictable mishmash of stories that most of us are content to ignore, columnists we don’t respect and advertisements for services and merchandise we don’t need.
The Aspers, Ospreys and phone company bureaucrats who control most of Canada’s dailies are comforted by the notion that their assets have survived assaults by radio, television and now the internet, and that, I think, is a real problem for readers.
Equally, though, it may be a real opportunity for new competitors. While newspapers have resisted change in Canada, exciting, and dramatically different methods of gathering and delivering news to ordinary people are taking shape and succeeding in other parts of the world.
In South Korea, where news and newspapers are tightly controlled by a small group of conservative owners (sound familiar?), Oh Yeon Ho, a maverick former magazine writer has launched a bold experiment in participatory journalism, in which tens of thousands of people without any formal news-gathering training make daily contributions to the online OhmyNews, as well as to a weekly print edition. There’s also an online English edition, OhmyNews International (english.ohmynews.com).
From a standing start in 2000, Oh has managed to become a major force in South Korean politics by helping to elect reformer Roh Moo-hyun as president, transform the practice of journalism in his country, excite interest abroad and even turn a profit. (South Korea’s new president returned the favour by granting OhmyNews the first interview after his election, giving three establishment dailies the cold shoulder.)
Conceptually, OhmyNews may sound like a blog with delusions of grandeur, but it’s much more than that. Anyone, anywhere in the world, can be what Oh calls a “citizen reporter”—and what’s more, they can be paid for contributions.
You’re never in the slightest danger of getting rich, it’s true, but depending on how a team of editors chooses to play your story on the website, you could collect a fee of about $30. Some citizen reporters make as much as $150 a month, but remember: it’s not their day job.
And, unlike most blogs, OhmyNews actually exposes its contributors to a huge readership: individual stories can generate 100,000 or more hits.
Each day, Oh’s army of volunteers sends in about 200 items; roughly 70 percent of those are posted by staff editors, who also clean up spelling, grammar and punctuation. The onus is on the citizen reporters to declare potential conflicts (such as whether, for instance, they are in real life public relations or advertising people and therefore might be shilling for clients) and to accept all legal responsibility and liability for their reports.
But OhmyNews also encourages readers to comment on and rate each story, thereby generating lively, genuine and democratic debate in real time. Try doing that with the Globe or your local paper.
Recently, the international edition carried a five-part series called “My Life as a Hogtown Graphic Designer,” written by a woman in Toronto. It’s pretty familiar stuff if you’re from Canada, but Helen Lee’s accounts of taking Via Rail to a friend’s farm and munching fresh corn and burgers might well strike people in South Korea and other parts of the world as exotic and riveting.
If Oh has made any real journalistic breakthrough, it is in successfully harnessing the efforts of amateurs and professionals. Besides his team of editors, he has about 50 paid, full-time reporters who cover politics, business and other subjects deemed to require some level of real expertise. But even these so-called pros are largely drawn from the ranks of the citizen reporters.
There has never been a time in Canada when so many newspapers, radio and television stations have been owned and directed by so few. That in itself is a huge problem for readers. Add to that the distressing degree of concentration of attitude and point of view resulting from most of the people at major Canadian media outlets being trained at two or three journalism schools, and the prospect of any real diversity is slight to nil.
Oh has already encouraged a branch operation in Japan and is eager to see his experiment succeed in other countries. Canada is one place that’s ripe for OhmyNews or something like it.
