I had the opportunity to talk to Oh Yeon Ho, founder of "the world’s biggest platform for citizen journalism", OhmyNews (in a three-way conversation with Fukui Fumio of the Kyoto Sanjo Radio Cafe, at soboro DIALOGUE Vol.2 at The Museum of Kyoto on 9/12). OhmyNews, a large-scale Korean online newspaper with a reported 1 million page views per day, was launched in 2000, and features contributions from 60 professional "regular journalists" and 44,000 "citizen reporters". The start of the Roh Moo-hyun administration enabled OhmyNews to exercise its leadership in Korea and install an English edition, registered contributors to which presently amount to 1,300 citizen reporters. A Japanese edition was just unveiled at the end of August. Personally I don't like to use the word "citizen", and although my version certainly isn't much better, for now I prefer to call it "alternative journalism", as we're talking about a form of "different" journalism that distinguishes OhmyNews from conventional media. While I am full of expectations from this "alternative style", at the same time I'm harboring doubts about it.
In his publicatin "The Channelge of OhmyNews", Oh explains that, "We launched OhmyNews to mark the end of one-way journalism where professional journalists write and readers read, and proclaim the birth of a bidirectional kind of journalism in which readers can become writers at any time. This is certainly one groundbreaking project in the Internet age, but things are definitely not all that simple. First of all, what is questionable are the skills and techniques of citizen reporters. Further, there is the problem of differentiation from other websites. According to Oh, the Japanese edition of OhmyNews is supposed to be "a neutral stage where different opinions can be presented on an equitable basis", and notes on the website state that "OhmyNews is going to follow a line of political and ideological neutrality" and "articles contributed by citizen reporters will not be deleted by the editorial team unless they spread false information, damage the reputation of others, or represent terrorist or other anti-humanitarian/anti-social views. Citizen reporters work independently from the editorial team." But, frankly speaking, I don't believe that in an online publication such thing is possible, and I don't even think it makes much sense.
The problem of citizen reporters' skills and techniques is probably no that important. With a minimum guidance and basic instructions as to how to make interviews and write texts, most "amateur reporters" won't have problems. Also, as such examples as "Wikipedia" show, there are experts all over the place out there, so depending on the topic we can surely expect not only true but high quality articles. What needs some deeper reflection however is the orientation and political stance of OhmyNews as a medium, which in my view are essential factors for a publication’s success.
Nicholas Lemann, the dean of the Graduate School of Journalism at Columbia University, contributed an article titled Amateur Hour to "The New Yorker" magazine (Aug. 7 & 14, 2006 editions), in which he defines "citizen journalism" (on the Internet) as follows: "Sites that publish contributions of people who don't have jobs with news organizations but are performing a similar function." He continues with an analysis of the state of things concerning well-established web magazines and recent blog culture: "The Internet is also a venue for press criticism… But none of that yet rises to the level of a journalistic culture rich enough to compete in a serious way with the old media — to function as a replacement rather than an addendum."
Basically, the dean has a high opinion of the Internet as a medium: "[Reporting in a traditional sense] is a powerful social tool, because it provides citizens with an independent source of information about the state and other holders ofpower. The Internet is the best reporting medium ever invented. To keep pushing in that direction, though requires that we hold up original reporting as a virtue and use the Internet to find new ways of presenting fresh material — which, inescapably, will wind up being produced by people who do that full time, not 'citizens' with day jobs. As journalism moves to the Internet, the main project ought to be moving reporters there, not stripping them away."
While talking about the adventages of citizen journalism, the article seems to be putting particular emphasis on the aspect of "professionalism". Even more than this, however, what is notable about the text is the choice of the expression "rich journalistic culture". In this case, "rich" probably means "diversified", a quality that OhmyNews Japan is trying to achieve by "presenting different opinions on an equitable basis". But considering that the Internet is an acentric network, diversification at large has been guaranteed right from the start. If one wanted to further enhance the diversified quality of the Internet community, one would rather have to emphasize a website’s originality and uniqueness. If you take a bowl of salad and add more salad, that'll just drown, and what you get is still the same salad. If you want to make the salad more delicious and diverse, you'll have to throw in some spices and other ingredients that introduce new flavors.
Since its launch, OhmyNews Japan has been sported at for aiming to provoke reactions from the so-called "2channelers". A regular contributor to "2channel", recently notorious for many anonymous contributions from right-wing authors, became a "citizen reporter" and contributed a fake left-ish article, which 2ch'ers resented as "anti-2channel", as a consequence of which the column for readers' comments has turned into a "blazing battlefield". The aforementioned article was based on the author’s own (feigned!) opinion and assertion rather than on facts, and to me the existence of such comment posting systems and vague criteria for publishing articles seem extremely questionable as a medium’s substantial features. Private opinions and convictions should be posted to "2channel" or other bulletin boards and personal blogs. In order to achieve serious, alternative journalism, one would have to follow Lemann’s advice and "find new ways of presenting fresh material". That’s something that can't be done by simply posting a couple of lines to some publication’s "readers' comments" column. What is necesary first is to establish and profess a position that is different from the rest.
Ozaki Tetsuya / Editor in chief / REALTOKYO