OhmyNews is a South Korean online newspaper with the motto "Every Citizen is a Reporter". It was founded by Oh Yeon Ho on February 22, 2000.
It is the first of its kind in the world to accept, edit and publish articles from its readers, in an open source style of news reporting. About 20% of the site’s content is written by the 55-person staff, while most of the articles are written by other freelance contributors who are mostly ordinary citizens.
OhmyNews was influential in determining the outcome of the South Korean presidential elections in December 2002 with the election of Roh Moo Hyun. After being elected, Roh granted his first interview to OhmyNews.
It was launched firstly in Korean Language and afterward for its growing popularity OhmyNews authority has decided to launch its International version International is English.
All the news stories published here are written by nonprofessional "citizen reporter" that means the contributors who are not journalist in real profession, from all over the globe.
On February 22, 2006, OhmyNews and Japanese firm Softbank signed an investment contract valued at US$11 million. In 2006 OhmyNews started to build a Japan-based citizen-participatory journalism site called OhmyNews
These journalists’ articles were the object of much criticism, on Nov. 17, 2006, the newspaper ended the citizen-participation aspect of the paper. The South Korean newspaper admitted that OhmyNews Japan had failed.
On November 24, 2007, OhmyNews opened a "citizen journalism school" to serve as a "collaborative knowledge center" for classes in journalism, digital cameras and photojournalism.
Present Setup
In the present setup OhmyNews accepts news from any place from the world by anybody. Main sections in the OhmyNews International are:
- World
- Science and Technology
- Art and Life
- Entertainment
- Sports
- Global Watch
- Interview and
- Podcasts
In each and every sections are contributed by thousands of Citizen Journalists from allover the world. But after submitting any news to their news portal the news has to go through a cross-check by OhmyNews editor panel and then become finalized to be published for the readers. The editor panel reserves full authorization to edit any part or headline of any news, even to delete the news if there is any defamatory statement.
OhmyNews Panel:
Publisher
Oh Yeon-ho, President and CEO
Newsroom
Todd Thacker, Senior Editor
Shane Tasker, Assistant Editor
Business Development
Jean K. Min, Int’l Business Relations / Corporate Communications
Section Preview:
- By the side of the citizen journalist’s writing they also provide some lead links from International Herald Tribune.
- Top ten views section is there for skim through the hottest issues posted during the last week in OhmyNews.
- A poll section is also there to get public reaction on any important contemporary issue.
- OhmyNews provides RSS Feed to the subscribers to be up-to-date about the news update on their site.
- Readers will get the benefit to search out news by means of its Title, Author or Content by its smart search option.
- As the citizen journalists are the main power of this online news agency. They are voluntarily started to teach their contributors about the basics and trips and tricks on journalism through the citizen journalism section. As a result the contributors there are really getting more and more skilled day by day and the site is also being rich in its duty.
An overview:
Some important issues which can make and news report worthless are like: Stating Biased or defamatory statement, use of subjectivity and pushing personal point of view into the news.
In those cases OhmyNews has a strong position in maintaining the mainstream. That is the whole control of the content is fully maintained by the editor panel, so the citizen journalists are not allowed to directly put any data into the news board. But I think another thing is that it is not always possible for the editor panel to judge each information in any news, that’s why the risk of information fairness remains still in risk.
But as the authority is providing training to the contributors the risk of unorganized and unprofessional reporting is shrinking I think. And another important thing is that in any specific story several users can write report, as a result any specific incident could be seen in different dimensions. On the other hand its comment feature is also a powerful tool to judge a story on its track.
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