OhmyNews in South Korea

* Oh Yeon-ho introducing visitors to the OhmyNews forum

Oh Yeon-ho, the founder and CEO of OhmyNews, wanted to start a tradition free of newspaper company elitism and created OhmyNews to change society.

Oh launced a test version in December 1999, with a staff of four and had received 20 articles from citizen reporters.

By mid 2007, the number of Korean citizen reporters reached almost 60,000.

OhmyNews International was launched in May 2004 and by March 2007, had 3,000 citizen reporters from 100 countries, attracting more than 700,000 repeat visitors each day.

At a time where international news is rapidly losing ground, at rates greater than any other topic area, OhmyNews International enables an audience member to receive foreign news that they might not receive from a local or national paper in their location, by visiting the site to further enhance their knowledge.

An average of about 200 stories are submitted by citizen reporters each day and about a third of these are rejected for reasons such as poor sentence construction, factual errors or the lack of news value, ensuring the quality of journalism is not diminished.

Citizen reporters must sign a code of ethics and violation of this agreement can result in the membership being revoked, an important aspect in regards to accuracy, credibility and verification.

OhmyNews enables an audience to consume newsworthy articles that they may not normally be exposed to.

“OhmyNews strives to listen to the voices of no one but our readers and citizen reporters”. 

 In my opinion, OhmyNews has changed society by combining traditional journalism with citizen journalism, to create a unique website.