OhmyNews International

» see english.ohmynews.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

OhmyNews launched in Seoul in February 2000 with a small staff and a slogan that turned out to be a business model. Readers filed stories, editors checked and ranked them, and the ones that ran got paid a small amount plus whatever readers tipped. By 2004 the Korean site was taking more than a hundred and fifty stories a day from tens of thousands of registered citizen reporters against roughly thirty five staff journalists, and after the 2002 presidential election went the way it did, Roh Moo-hyun gave OhmyNews his first interview as president rather than one of the national dailies.

The English edition went up in 2004 and became OhmyNews International, running almost entirely on citizen reporters, now scattered across every time zone instead of one country. Contributors filed from Afghanistan and Zimbabwe and anywhere else somebody had a modem and an opinion about what was happening outside their window. It got the attention the Korean parent had earned, hosted the citizen journalism forum crowd, and ran a journalism school in 2007 to teach the method to people who wanted to copy it.

The verification never scaled. A desk in Seoul could ring a Korean contributor's town and find out whether the story was true, and could not do the same for a report from Zimbabwe on a Tuesday afternoon. Money went first: contributor payments stopped in February 2009 and a membership drive was launched to try to cover the shortfall. In August 2010 the closure was reported, and by September the international site had stopped accepting new articles and turned into a place to discuss citizen journalism. The archive stayed up, frozen.

~ the case file ~

~ what the korean version had ~

The part that never got exported was the bit that made it work. OhmyNews grew inside a country with near-universal broadband and one language, at a political moment that gave young readers a reason to distrust the newspapers they already had. Its reporters were not anonymous internet users; they were people who could be phoned back.

The international edition inherited the slogan and none of that. It had contributors who shared nothing except the ability to write English, which is a much weaker thing to build an editorial process on than a shared country.

~ the money ~

Citizen journalism sites in this period were all trying to answer the same question, which is who pays the person who files. OhmyNews paid, modestly, and treated it as a point of principle. When the payments stopped in 2009 the site was honest about why, and the hundred thousand member club it announced instead was the sort of fundraising drive that tells you the advertising was never going to arrive. Eighteen months later the news operation was finished.

~ what came after ~

What lived on is the assumption, not the institution. That readers file, and that a phone in a crowd beats a correspondent in a taxi: both became normal, and neither needed an editorial desk paying twenty dollars a story. The sites that formalized the idea, Backfence and NowPublic among them, mostly closed inside the same handful of years while the behavior they were built around kept growing.

Reading it from Turkey in the late 2000s, the pitch was hard to place. Turkish news sites already had enormous reader comment sections under every article, so the raw material was there, but nobody was turning that into a newsroom with bylines and payments. The comment field and the citizen reporter are the same impulse handled with completely different levels of seriousness, and the Korean version is the one that took it seriously enough to try to pay for it.

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