Got this on another list (Thanks Michael Gurstein)
What do PatchA, Oh, MJ, YJ and our other Korean colleagues think about this
article?
>
> http://www.nytimes.com/2003/03/06/international/asia/06SEOU.html?tntemail1
>
> Online Newspaper Shakes Up Korean Politics
> By HOWARD W. FRENCH
>
>
> EOUL, South Korea - For years, people will be debating what made this
> country go from conservative to liberal, from gerontocracy to youth
culture
> and from staunchly pro-American to a deeply ambivalent ally - all
seemingly
> overnight.
>
> For most here, the change is symbolized by the election in December of Roh
> Moo Hyun, a reformist lawyer with a disarmingly unfussy style who at 56 is
> youthful by South Korean political standards. But for many observers, the
> most important agent of change has been the Internet.
>
> By some measures, South Korea is the most wired country in the world, with
> broadband connections in nearly 70 percent of households. In the last
year,
> as the elections were approaching, more and more people were getting their
> information and political analysis from spunky news services on the
Internet
> instead of from the country's overwhelmingly conservative newspapers.
>
> Most influential by far has been a feisty three-year-old startup with the
> unusual name of OhmyNews. Around election time the free online news
service
> was registering 20 million page views per day.
>
> Although things have cooled down a bit, even these days the service
averages
> about 14 million visits daily, in a country of only about 40 million
people.
>
> The online newspaper, which began with only four employees, started as a
> glimmer in the eye of Oh Yeon Ho, now 38, a lifelong journalistic rabble
> rouser who wrote for underground progressive magazines during the long
years
> of dictatorship here.
>
> Its name, OhmyNews, a play on the expression "Oh my God!" which entered
the
> Korean language by way of a comedian who popularized it around the time
the
> online service was founded in 2000.
>
> Although the staff has grown to 41, from the beginning the electronic
> newspaper's unusual concept has been to rely mostly on contributions from
> ordinary readers all over the country, who send dispatches about
everything
> from local happenings and personal musings to national politics.
>
> Only 20 percent of the paper each day is written by staff journalists. So
> far, a computer check shows, there have been more than 10,000 other
bylines.
>
> The newspaper deals with questions of objectivity and accuracy by grading
> articles according to their content. Those that are presented as straight
> news are fact-checked by editors. Writers are paid small amounts, which
vary
> according to how the stories are ranked, using forestry terminology, from
> "kindling" to "rare species."
>
> "My goal was to say farewell to 20th-century Korean journalism, with the
> concept that every citizen is a reporter," said Mr. Oh, a wiry, intense
man
> whose mobile phone never stops ringing - and who insists his name has no
> connection with the newspaper's.
>
> "The professional news culture has eroded our journalism," he said, "and I
> have always wanted to revitalize it. Since I had no money, I decided to
use
> the Internet, which has made this guerrilla strategy possible."
>
> The kind of immediacy this brand of journalism can bring to a story was
> brought home again in late January by the dispatches of a firefighter from
> the central city of Taegu, who sent gripping accounts of the subway arson
> disaster there, which killed nearly 200 people.
>
> More pertinent to the impact OhmyNews has had on the country's political
> culture were reports the service ran last summer after two schoolgirls
were
> crushed to death by a United States Army armored vehicle on patrol.
>
> OhmyNews's reports of the incident were widely seen as forcing the hand of
> the mainstream media to pay attention to a story that conservative
tradition
> here suggests they might have been inclined to ignore.
>
> The rest is, as they say, history: a series of demonstrations against the
> Army presence here snowballed in the fall and winter, becoming a huge
> national movement that many see as having propelled the candidacy of Mr.
> Roh.
>
> The new president was, until then, a relative unknown and third in a field
> of three major candidates. If no one else caught on to this link, Mr. Roh
> appears to have. After his election, he granted OhmyNews the first
interview
> he gave to any Korean news organization.
>
> For Mr. Oh, the story of the American military accident had echoes of one
of
> his first big scoops, a story he wrote as a little-known freelance
> journalist in 1994 on the No Gun Ri incident, a reported massacre of South
> Korean refugees by United States military forces who opened fire on them
at
> a railroad trestle in the summer of 1950, during the Korean War.
>
> The South Korean press made almost no mention of his reports after he
broke
> the story, but five years later The Associated Press wrote about the
> incident, winning a Pulitzer Prize for its subsequent investigation with
> American Army veterans.
>
> "Once the American media picked up the story, our mainstream newspapers
> wrote about No Gun Ri as if it was a fresh incident," Mr. Oh said. "This
> made me realize that we have a real imbalance in our media, 80 percent
> conservative and 20 percent liberal, and it needed to be corrected. My
goal
> is 50-50."
>
> After he broke the No Gun Ri story, Mr. Oh went away to school in the
United
> States, earning a master's degree at the conservative, explicitly
Christian
> Regent University in Virginia Beach, Va., whose president is the
evangelist
> pastor Pat Robertson. It might have seemed like an unlikely choice, but
Mr.
> Oh said it was deliberate.
>
> "Pat Robertson and I are very different in temperament and ideology, but
we
> are very similar in strategy," said Mr. Oh, who became what he calls a
> serious Christian during his stay in the United States. "They are very
> right-wing and wanted to overthrow what they saw as a liberal media
> establishment. I wanted to overthrow a right-wing media establishment, and
I
> learned a lot from them."
>
> Although OhmyNews pays its staff less than reporters earn at the top South
> Korean newspapers, morale appears to very high. "Wherever I go, people ask
> me, `What about the pay?' " said Son Byung Kwan, 31, a reporter who helped
> break the story about the American soldiers' accident. "I took a 30
percent
> pay cut to work here, but things couldn't be better. My company is so
famous
> that I have become well known, and best of all, my stories have real
> impact."
>
>
>
>