The OhmyNews International Citizen Reporters' Forum (see previous report)
concluded on Saturday with several speeches and a visit to sponsoring
companies in South Korea's technology sector. Some invited "citizen
reporters" from around the world extended their stay by several days to
tour the country. Since the conclusion of the conference, presentations
and transcripts have been published on the OhmyNews web site.
Wikinews and OhmyNews
The forum sessions took place in the conference center of the COEX
Convention & Exhibition Center in Seoul. Interpreters provided
translation services into English and Korean. Saturday began with a
series of panels, each one consisting of three short presentations
followed by a brief discussion with the audience. The first
presentation was an introduction to Wikinews by Erik Möller (online copy). Möller described the history of the project and its relation to the well-known online encyclopedia Wikipedia, demonstrated a working copy of the wiki software MediaWiki,
and showed some example Wikinews articles. He listed different
possibilities for cooperation between Wikinews and OhmyNews,
particularly content partnerships, shared communication channels and
shared resource pools for citizen journalists. "I extend the hand of
friendship to OhmyNews," Möller concluded.
A brief presentation of the history of OhmyNews by Jean K. Min,
Director of the International Division, followed. Min cited media
reports emphasizing the growing significance of the web site in Korea,
and outlined the strategy of expansion to new markets. The English
edition, officially launched in May 2004, is seen as a key project in
this regard, a test for the feasibility of the OhmyNews model outside
Korea. Contributors to both the English and the Korean version receive
a small compensation for their work, and the Korean system uses an
integrated payment system that has led to donations ("tips") of
thousands of dollars to some OhmyNews contributors.
In the panel discussion that followed, one audience member asked
whether, given the for-profit nature of OhmyNews and the non-profit
nature of Wikinews, there might be a potential for conflict. Möller
responded that, in his view, it was the compatible philosophies of the
projects that mattered, and that a for-profit endeavor did not
necessarily mean that all competitors have to be destroyed. "I don't
think Oh Yeon Ho wants to be a new Rupert Murdoch," he said.
Grass-roots journalism in the U.S. and "user-created content"
The first speaker of the next session was Clyde Bentley, Associate
Professor teaching online journalism at the University of Missouri.
Bentley introduced the project MyMissourian.com,
which he has founded together with journalism students. As in the case
of OhmyNews, editors vet stories submitted by "citizen reporters."
Bentley's group organized several special reporting events, such as one
centering around Earth Day,
a festival about environmental awareness: "We set up a booth, and we
set up some wireless computers and some other materials, and let people
come in and just write about Earth Day. It was very successful." The
most successful part of the experiment, according to Bentley, was to
lend digital cameras to let people take and share photos.
Bentley argued that alternative journalism was less needed in the
United States than in South Korea due to its long democratic tradition.
He sees the usefulness of projects like MyMissourian.com in raising
awareness of local issues and stories that might otherwise be ignored.
The challenge, Bentley concluded, is to build a new "journalism of
sharing." Instead of being storytellers, journalists in such a scenario
would be "story guides", assuring consistency and quality.
The next speaker on the panel was Jeremy Iggers, a reporter for the Minneapolis Star Tribune who did not, however, speak as a representative of his newspaper. He gave a prepared speech
contrasting his early efforts promoting civic journalism with his
latest endeavors in citizen journalism. "I can trace this interest in
citizen journalism back to the early 90s, when I created a public
journalism project called Minnesota's Talking for the
Minneapolis Star Tribune," Iggers said. Readers were invited to join
monthly issue discussion groups in private homes, community centers,
libraries, and sometimes churches. "At the peak, we had around 100
meeting sites, with over 1,000 participants."
However, this and similar experiments in civic journalism were
cancelled, which Iggers called "really unfortunate." As a
revitalization of these abortive efforts online, Iggers has founded the
Twin Cities Media Alliance, which he wants to use to bootstrap a
"Community Newswire" following a similar model to OhmyNews. Beyond
reports by citizens, Iggers also wants to make use of stories published
by local community newspapers in Minneapolis. He emphasized that this
project is independent from his work for the Star Tribune, and that it might represent a conflict of interest.
The final speaker of this panel was Neil Thurman, Associate
Professor at the City University London. Thurman has conducted
extensive studies on how traditional media in the United Kingdom make
use of "user-generated content" on the Internet: "The Guardian,
for example, which is the most popular British news website, allows
unedited and unselected comments on its pages; none of the other
newspapers in the UK does." Thurman also argued that "the amounts of
user participation that's archived on message boards varies a great
deal, you can see with the Daily Mail there's over a million posts, whereas the Financial Times has barely 10,000."
One of Thurman's key observations is that many user forums and
feedback mechanisms were shut down or strongly restricted due to a
perceived lack of control over the nature of the comments published in
this way. Government-funded or non-profit efforts, Thurman observed,
are generally more open to the idea of experimenting with user-created
content.
Citizen reporters in their own words
The afternoon sessions focused mostly on the individual stories of
OhmyNews citizen reporters from Korea and around the world. This
included testimonials from:
- Kim Hye Won, who introduced herself as "a traditional Korean
housewife who lives together with a husband, two children and an
86-year-old mother-in-law." She wrote many of the "life stories" that
are typical for OhmyNews, such as "I Donated Blood to See a Movie for
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