January 09, 2006
Jean K. Min, director of OhmyNews International, has a commentary in India Infoline: Journalism as a conversation.
What happens on OhmyNews is an intensely interactive online conversation. Citizen reporters have to persuade OhmyNews’ front-line copy editors to have their stories accepted in the first place. As much as 30 percent of daily submissions are rejected for various reasons such as poor sentence construction, factual errors, or its lack of news value. After stories are accepted and edited, then placed in a more prominent space, usually within minutes they draw scores of readers’ feedback. When the story is controversial, as in the case of Goh’s, the number of readers’ comments can shoot up to hundreds and even thousands.This feedback from readers, coupled with editorial advice by OhmyNews’ copy editors, gives citizen reporters invaluable lessons in writing. A quick online search through the OhmyNews database yields 500 to 600 stories for some of our diligent citizen reporters and the difference of quality between their first and more recent writing is remarkable. Nearly 70 OhmyNews citizen reporters now have contracts to write books. If you believe, as I do, that an adequate level of writing skills is an important ability for citizens to have in a civil democracy, then OhmyNews’ citizen reporters can proudly be named the most capable practitioners of “the Emersonian vision of an expressive society.”
The New York Times – and many other prominent news organizations – appear to consider the Web as simply another format in which to sell their news content. They sold the news once in the paper medium, now they will sell it again to an online audience and increase the return on their investment. For OhmyNews, the Web is seen neither as a channel for information flow nor as a pipeline for news delivery. It is a playground for our readers, a cyberspace for Netizens. ...
Only as an afterthought did it dawn on us that the audience is the real content on the Web. Like any nimble disk jockey in a cool nightclub in town would do, we gave them a place to hang out and mingle in with the brightest minds in Korean cyberspace. One survey by a major Korean portal revealed nearly 40 percent of users’ daily mouse clicks on it were for user-generated content, such as readers’ comments and blog posts. A similar result was also found for OhmyNews. OhmyNews readers generate on average somewhere between 30 to 50 percent of daily traffic on the Web site through their participation in various online forums (other than their reading of the news). This is surely a wealth of eyeballs that any shrewd advertiser would salivate for. The “audience as the content” model makes a lot of sense for our business as well. ...
