I want to take this occasion of the 10th birthday of OhmyNews to congratulate Mr. Oh Yeon Ho, the founder and CEO of OhmyNews and its present and former staff members who have contributed to the creation and development of an important new institutional form in the field of journalism.

In his original plans for the creation of OhmyNews, Mr. Oh spoke about the need for a 21st century form of journalism, and about the desire to pioneer such a journalism. (1) OhmyNews has been exploring how to create a form of journalism that builds on the open processes of the Internet and the contributions of netizens. Important to Mr. Oh when he began OhmyNews was whether the quality of journalism determined the media environment. He wanted to counter where the power and wealth of a media organization would determine the impact a news article would have.

This… weiter lesen

Part I – Netizen Journalism Panel: The Internet, Netizens, and Journalism

[Note: In October, 2008 there was a panel about Netizen Journalism at the 9th annual conference of Internet researchers (IR9.0 is the tag) which was held in Copenhagen. Following is an abstract for the panel, and then a summary that Axel Bruns posted on his blog of the session. A slightly edited version of one of the talks at the panel, my talk about Candlelight 2008 in South Korea as an example of Watchdog Journalism, is online in an earlier post on my blog.]

In his pioneering research about the impact of the Internet, Michael Hauben recognized that the nature of the Net made possible a new form of citizenship, a participatory form that is oriented toward a public purpose. He called the people who were developing this new form of citizenship, netizens.(1)

What would be the… weiter lesen