If I add some details to the presidential election observed here,
The most unlikely elected candidate(President Roh Moo Huyn)'s supporters
for 2002 presidential election mobilized a group, NOSAMO, to help his
campaign. Then the candidate has been know to have little money and
poor relations to the existing political connections.
NOSAMO started with a small group of people and the current number of
members is 81831 as of today.(www.nosamo.org)
There are lots of NOSAMO branchs in many other countries which
are all networked through the Internet. You can visit to the following
url to see where they are. It covers five regions.
http://www.nosamoworld.org/region.html
Therefore, I do believe in the fact that "PEOPLE" can make changes
especially in the networked environment. The Internet and its policies
including Internet resource allocation decision should be made by
at-large public rather than a small group of people who have vested
interests under one specific government's oversight as of 2003.
YJ
----- Original Message -----
From: "Alan G. Alegre" <alalegre@fma.ph>
To: "wsis-asia" <communication@wsisasia.org>
Sent: Friday, March 07, 2003 11:26 AM
Subject: [communication 595] Fw: [CI] Online Newspaper Shakes Up Korean
Politics
> 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."
> >
> >
> >
> >
>