Director Explains Basics of How OhmyNews Works
Jean K. Min, director of OhmyNews International, tells India Infoline audience how OhmyNews started and how it functions. Min says in part:
A recurring fear among journalists is that the coming age of citizen journalism would signal the end of “journalism as a serious profession.” On the contrary, the OhmyNews experience shows that trained journalists will be in greater demand as an increasing number of “citizen journalists” start to produce explosive amounts of news themselves. Alas, if only journalists would understand how to reinvent themselves in this age of citizen journalism!
Adding:
Recently, OhmyNews opened a new service feature in which our readers can participate in the editorial process by voting for their favorite writers or stories. OhmyNews servers collect the data and sort out the stories according to the number of votes each received. If we can define the first generation OhmyNews as “a massively distributed collaborative news operation on the Web,” OhmyNews 2.0 can be described as “a massively distributed collaborative editorial participation on the Web.” For example, when citizen reporters set up their personal blog site in OhmyNews, we encourage them to become an editor for their own edition of OhmyNews. They can drag and drop any of the few hundred stories available on OhmyNews each day to build their personal edition. Now every citizen can be an editor at OhmyNews.
