PJNet

I finally met someone today who had little use for OhMyNews. He’s South Korean journalist Jae-Hoon Ryu, a senior staff writer for The Hankyoreh newspaper.

A lot of people in the US have written about OhMyNews, the online citizen written newspaper and almost all of it sounds favorable.

Ryu, who is here on a state department sponsored visit, thinks differently. While we were talking about public journalism, he used a translator, but when I asked him about OhMyNews, he quickly corrected me and said in English, “It’s not OhMyNews, it’s OhMyOpinion.”

He said it’s a propogranda tool and is taking away from what pure news should be. However, he says, of the average citizen, “They like it. They read it.” In fact so much so it is taking away his paper’s readership and making times tough for a liberal newspaper like his own.

He says it is worse than Drudge, adding there is nothing factual about it. You can’t check the sources. He said, people who write get carried away and build on an issue and fire people up by spreading rumors.

Having worked on public journalism here for years, I have seen journalists react negatively to change. And here shows the limits of a blogger. I can only report his side.

However, there is one thing you have to know about Ryu and his paper The Hankyoreh. He said, it is one of the few liberal papers in South Korea. It started in the last part of the 1980s at the end of what was called the military “democracy,” and the first editors and reporters paid a heavy price for writing about the military.

It also got started, he said, because 60,000 citizens contributed to it. They didn’t want anyone to own more than one percent of the paper. So this is a paper that grew close to the people, and Ryu said its journalists are proud of how they helped build a more democratic South Korea. But he worries about the effect of citizen journalism as it is written in OhMyNews.

He maintains that all professional journalists can do is maintain high standards and hope that wins out in the end.

I believe we must have journalists work more closely with citizens, so we can maintain standards, but also tap into the citizen energy and enthusiasm. But maybe it is too late. Maybe the citizen genie is out of the bottle, and we can’t be put it back in.

Back in April I wrote here: I have read a lot about OhmyNews and written about it too. Now it’s time for one of our scholars to take a deep look at it. Is it living up to all the touting it has received? Each time I write about it I get a bit of a cringe because I ask: Are we sure?

Let’s get some researcher or reporter out there. Let’s find out how well it is working. Does it improve democracy or detract from it?

It is a precursor for what might be happening in the USA, and we can learn from its growth and influence.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, October 5th, 2004 at 12:40 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.