The OMNI Citizen Reporter's Forum
Reviewing the Roots of Citizen Journalism and Thinking about the Future
I recently returned from visiting Korea and attending the OhmyNews International (OMNI) Citizen Reporter's Forum 2006. It was the 2nd such Forum (What will be the future?). OhmyNews invited 60 citizen reporters or others who were involved with citizen journalism.
The forum featured a range of speakers. Some like Timothy Lord of Slashdot.com and Craig Newmark of Craigslist.com are active in various online activities in the US, even if they are not connected with citizen journalism. Also there were sessions of talks by citizen reporters from different countries around the world. All the formal sessions of the forum are online.
The context in which OhmyNews was created is important to keep in mind when thinking about the forum and the trend of citizen journalism that OhmyNews has pioneered. South Korea leads the world in the spread of broadband Internet access to its population. Over 80% of households have broadband connectivity at home. Online discussion and activity play a prominent role among Korean netizens and are a catalyst for offline actions.
The South Korean struggle for democracy continues after its relatively recent victory in the June 1987 democratic revolution over the military junta. The creation of the Korean edition of OhmyNews in 2000 was as a part of the struggle for more democracy and against the conservative forces that continue to be active in Korean politics and society.
When I arrived in Korea on Wednesday, July 12, there was a major demonstration in downtown Seoul protesting the Korean-US negotiations over a bi-lateral Free Trade Agreement (FTA). The demonstration is said to have included 50,000 protesters despite the heavy rains and despite the fact that there were approximately 20,000 Korean police surrounding the demonstration site. A week later the FTA talks in Seoul broke down temporarily to the relief of many in Korea. Opposition to the FTA is strong due to concerns about the harmful impact many believe a FTA with the US will have on the Korean economy. The large anti-FTA demonstration was a sign of the continuing struggle for democracy in Korea.
When the OMNI forum opened on Wednesday evening, we were told that citizen reporters from 20 countries were attending the forum. And that the number of countries in which OMNI has citizen reporters increased from 50 the previous year to 91. There are currently 1,200 citizen reporters for the international edition, and the most recent who registered were from Lebanon and Cuba. An investment in OMNI by the Japanese company Softbank, announced a few months earlier, was intended in part to make it possible to spread the OhmyNews model to other countries. OMNI is planning to launch an OhmyNews Japan on August 28 as its first effort to develop a version of OhmyNews in another country.
I later learned from the editor of the international edition, Hong Eun-taek, that there is a thought about increasing articles from little reported areas of the world and offering OMNI as a newswire to interested media. An announcement at the Wednesday evening session of the forum explained that the International Herald Tribute newspaper (IHT) will include three sections of OMNI in its online edition, the "sports" section, "entertainment" section, and the "technology" section. Also 10 headlines from IHT appear on the front pages of OMNI.
On Thursday, the first full day of the forum, I was fortunate to have lunch with Professor Yoon Young-chul, a journalism professor from Yonsei University. He introduced me to one of his former students. She is a researcher doing her PhD thesis about the role of OhmyNews (OMN), the Korean edition, in initiating the candlelight demonstrations in 2002.1
The role that OMN has played in the democratic struggles in Korea and similarly the role that the democratic struggles have played in the evolution of OMN is an important factor in the origin and development of the online newspaper. This was the subject we discussed during the lunch breaks. OMN developed in Korea as an online media able to challenge the entrenched conservative press. What are the elements of OMN that made it possible to succeed in this endeavor? One aspect I learned from the researcher, was the role played by Oh Yeon-ho, the founder of OhmyNews. When he announced he would start OhmyNews, she explained, he was already well known and respected by progressive people who were therefore willing to be part of the effort ("News Guerrillas" auf dem Vormarsch) Hence he was a person who was able to get the needed netizen support for OhmyNews from its earliest days.
Oh Yeon-ho's opening remarks at the forum helped to highlight the democratic tradition of OMN. He explained that the key to spreading the OMN model was to find citizen reporters who were, "passionately committed to social change and reporting". It is these citizen reporters, he said, who "make our project possible."
This issue was again raised during session 7 held on Friday, July 14. In this session, there were presentations about two citizen reporter sites which had been inspired by OhmyNews. The Danish site flix.dk was started in 2003 after its founder, Erik Larsen, a journalist and writer, read an article about OhmyNews in Wired Magazine. This was before the English edition of OhmyNews. Larsen went to a Korean translator to learn as much as he could about OMN. In November 2003 he started flix.dk with 2 colleagues. Flix.dk functions on a nonprofit basis though Larsen constantly faces the need to raise adequate funds to keep going. But also Larsen is wary of being tied to a business model. He feels it is important to be able to learn and build on the actual developments as they unfold on flix.dk.
Also during session 7, Michael Weiss presented his site scope.co.il in Israel. Weiss started scope.co.il after he returned to Israel from the OhmyNews forum last year. He was able to get funding from a venture capitalist for his startup.
Both Larsen and Weiss said they planned to open an English section of their online sites. As soon as Larsen returned to Denmark after the OMNI forum, a small English section was set up.
Probably the most critical issue facing the Korean OhmyNews, according to people I spoke with, was how the frustration among progressive people in Korea would affect OMN's future. Low voter turnout in the recent local elections resulted in the victory of the candidates from the Grand National Party (GNP), a conservative coalition. Many young people and other progressive forces were part of the democratic coalition that backed the relatively unknown politician Roh Moo-hyun for the presidency in 2002. OMN played an important role in the successful election campaign. After Roh won the election, however, many of those who were part of his online election campaign were disappointed by the neoliberal policies of his administration.
For some in the progressive community in Korea, this disappointment may be translated into disillusionment with politics. Others, however, are actively considering what lessons there are from the recent events. The situation in Korea is dynamic. The widespread broadband internet access and cell phone use means that there is a vibrant online community. Previously many of the democratic forces utilized the Internet in their struggles challenging the offline institutions and their influence. More recently, however, conservative forces are more and more using the Internet. Thus some feel that the online environment is becoming ever more contentious.
Whether online media like OMN can support and champion progressive news and opinion in the changing online environment is a question raised during some of the conversations I had while in Korea (Korean Cloning Hero Deconstructed Online).2
Another serious problem reflected at the forum was how to fund online media like OMN or Flix and how the form of funding impacts the content and form. One of the strengths of OMNI is that it pays a fee to citizen reporters. The fee is the equivalent of $20 for an article if the article appears on the front page. How to fund this and other expenses as OMNI scales to encompass a worldwide audience is a problem that was raised.
One of the speakers at the forum, Dan Gillmor, recently announced the end of Bayosphere, his experiment in citizen journalism. Bayosphere was initially funded by a venture capital investment. Gillmor wrote that one of the reasons for its failure was the focus on the business model before the development of a viable online site. Though there were no formal references to what caused the failure of Bayosphere during Gillmor's presentation at the OMNI 2006 forum, some felt this subject would have been a helpful area of discussion.
The Korean edition of OMN is funded in part by reader contributions, in part by advertising, and in part by the sale of content. Recently Softbank purchased a 12% share in OMNI in return for an $11 million investment. This investment gives Softbank a role in the development of OMNI. How this will impact the continuing development of OMNI is an issue for continuing attention.
After the forum, I had dinner with some of the staff of OhmyNews, Alex Krabbe, an OMNI citizen reporter from Germany, and Larsen from flix.dk. We spoke about what kind of alternative news media is needed to respond to the crisis that the mainstream press is in in countries like the US and Denmark. What are the issues that need to be covered? Would it be possible for citizen reporters working together to cover important stories, especially stories where the voice of the powerless and the victims are ignored by the main stream media?
A recent article in the journal, "Media, Culture and Society" about OhmyNews helps to identify the salient problem facing OMNI editors and contributors.3 The article raises the question of how to view alternative media that is a hybrid of progressive and commercial practices. The authors caution against jumping to conclusions about whether a publication can maintain a progressive nature even if it is funded by a commercial mechanism like advertising. Likewise they caution against automatically considering a publication progressive if it welcomes a broad range of content. Instead they note the tension experienced by alternative publications between the need to find a means of funding and the need to nourish progressive content and purpose.
An example of this problem was reflected in the talks given by different citizen reporters at the OMNI forum. Ramzy Baroud, a Palestinian and Lily Yulianti from Indonesia, for example, gave talks describing the importance of accurate presentations in the media of the conditions of the Palestinians and of Muslims.
Baroud explained that he grew up in a Palestinian refugee camp. He told the story of his father who would listen to BBC radio whenever he could. It was very important to his father to hear what was being reported about the Palestinian struggle, though often the reports were inaccurate. Baroud explained how he had come to feel that having accurate reports of what was happening, of the situation, were critical to making it possible for there to be any improvement in the plight of those who try to oppose unbridled power.
Baroud also discussed the need for online media to provide a public sphere to oppose globalization and the crimes of globalization. These presentations provided a contrast to an earlier presentation by Gregory Daigle from the US about how he was able to get over 50,000 hits on one of his OhmyNews articles when it was picked up by Digg.com and how citizen reporters should aim to gear their articles so they will get lots of hits.
The need for advertising dollars for alternative media like OhmyNews means that there is a tendency to focus on how to get more advertising. Yet there are already many publications focusing on getting lots of hits and lots of advertising dollars. If an alternative publication loses sight of the need to nourish its progressive content and purpose, however, it loses its reason for being.