Monday, May 22, 2006

OhMyNews Opens Up on Citizen Journalism

Korean-based OhMyNews has announced a new section designed to explore how citizen journalism is done.Citizen Journalism Theory and Practice will be an attempt to stimulate interest in citizen journalism as well as try to understand it better.

This is a far better move than trying to buy up Blogger in an effort to make all of us unwitting citizen journalists.

Editor-in-chief Hong Eun-taek had this to say about the venture:
The concept itself is not hard to understand; rather, it is its execution that is less than easy. Thus there are few successful citizen journalism sites. And for that reason we are launching a new section. We'd like to share what we have experienced and learned from our operation. Our new section "Citizen Journalism: Theory and Practice," we hope, will be a kind of teahouse for citizens to gather and freely discuss citizen journalism and share their own experiences with each other.

I'm thinking that I'd really like to talk with Hong Eun-taek to find out more about this new project. We over here don't really know much about what's going on in the rest of the world (we're so "centric") and it's rather fascinating how well OhMyNews has done, including recently obtaining huge financing from a very influential Asian bank.

It's also nice to see another source (other than Poynter) try to open up dialogue on how c.j. is done. Poynter's attempts, most notably those with Amy Gahran and Steve Outing, are good, but I wonder how many "citizens" know about them, and if what they discuss is influenced by American ideas about journalism (which, quite frankly, seem very different from those of other parts of the world.)

My sense of things is that those of us on both sides of the equation need to look at global perspectives on cit j. They might be helpful--or at least provide a little more fuel to a very interesting discussion

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