"Ohmynews targets Europe"

Korea’s citizen journalism news site Ohmynews is planning to launch “Ohmynews Europe”, reported the Telegraph in its online edition on December 21. If the plan comes true, the European version will be Ohmynews’s third overseas branch following Ohmynews International, based in the US, and Ohmynews Japan.
The story entitled “South Korean news pioneer targets Europe” seems Telegraph’s exclusive. No Korean medium has reported about the company’s plan to enter the European market.

Telegraph quoted Mr. Oh: “I hope I can keep introducing our model to other countries including Europe, North America and hopefully North Korea in the future. Why not? Actually, we are in talks with a European partner to launch an OhmyNews site in Europe." (The Telegraph writer made a mistake by calling Oh Yeon Ho, the founder of Ohmynews, Mr. Ho instead of Mr. Oh. She must be unfamiliar with Korean family names that come first, not last.)

According to the story, Mr. Oh did not reveal any timetable for the launch in Europe nor the partner that he is talking with. The plan may be too premature to discuss openly. It can be one of the ideas he is playing with for a long-term strategy. However, it can be clearly said that he is not discouraged at all by the criticisms over the news site’s performance both in Korea and overseas.

Mr. Oh strongly refuted the criticism that Ohmynews Japan has failed in mobilizing Japanese citizens: “I believe OhmyNews Japan, with more than 4,000 active citizen reporters as of today, has succeeded in introducing the citizen journalism model to Japanese society." He also defended his company’s financial loss in 2006 saying that Korea's advertising market - which accounts for 60pc of the group's revenue - was wallowing in the doldrums and Ohmynews invested heavily in the site's redevelopment.

Actually, Ohmynews has vigorously invested in various projects, the two most prominent items of which are establishing the Citizen Journalism School, a institution for training citizen reporters, and opening the “Ohmynews E” site, one of Ohmynews Korea’s new services.

Citizen Journalism School that opened November 24 is located in a rural town about 90 minutes by car away from Seoul. Mr. Oh invested $400,000 in refurbishing an elementary school building having been abandoned for more than 10 years into a journalism education center. Facilities will include three classrooms large enough to accommodate 100 students simultaneously and in-school lodging and dining capacity for 50 guests, complete with broadband Internet access and blanket Wi-Fi coverage. It also has a mid-size recreation area and room for other outdoor sports activities.

The education program will include journalism 101 classes for citizen reporters, writing workshops for new citizen reporters, and digital camera class customized for photo journalism and video news gathering. The faculty will be composed of professional journalists from print, radio and television news and senior OhmyNews citizen reporters, with additional teaching staff with a variety of expertise and colorful professional backgrounds.

As of September 1, 2007, Ohmynews announced another motto of “Every citizen is an editor” and began an experiment of opening up news editing function to the users. It created a new page entitled “Ohmynews E” – “E” stands for “Editor” – which contains a list of stories, comments and photos contributed by the users. Those who are not a citizen reporter can also contribute to this page. The List is initially edited by the newsroom editors but keeps changing according to the points given by the readers to each piece. The higher points an article receives, the better place on the list it goes to.

It is clear that Ohmynews has lost much of its popularity among Korean netizens over the past five years. The news site could not play such a crucial role in the last week’s presidential election that the conservative candidate, Lee Myung Bak, won as it did five years ago. But, taking the recent active investments into consideration, it is too early to evaluate its performance both as a news organization and a business model.

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NUJ Called on Bloggers to join the Journalist Union

National Union of Journalists (NUJ) that granted a blogger its membership for the first time in November moved one step further to embrace blogging as a form of journalism. Jeremy Dear (in the photo), the General Secretary of NUJ, has called on bloggers to join the union, saying that medial landscape is changing.

It was unclear in November when the organization accepted a blogger as a member if it really includes blogging within the boundaries of journalism. (See the entry entitled Are Bloggers Journalists? NUJ Said "Yes" on November 16)

The 20-year-old first NUJ member with a job title of blogger, Conrad Quilty-Harper, is working for a website owned by a media company, AOL, covering IT news.

In other words, he is a full-time professional ‘news worker’, which fulfils the basic conditions for a membership of NUJ. So, the labor union seemed to approach the issue of his membership from a technical perspective without a serious consideration into what is journalism.

"Bloggers of the world, unite" said Jeremy Dear

But, everything becomes clear by Mr. Dear’s article for The Guardian's opinion website Comment is Free on 18 December.

Dear knew that NUJ’s welcoming a blogger as a member has caused a stir. He said: “A worry about professional standards is often the reasoning behind those who have questioned whether we should have admitted a blogger into the union.”

“But this question fails to recognize the changing media landscape. Whether they're freelance or employed, in broadcast or in print, hundreds of our members are already blogging on a regular basis.

“The nature of journalism is changing and, as a union, we have to reflect the industry in which our members work. Clearly, not all people who blog are journalists, but journalists who are bloggers should be encouraged to join”, he argued.

Dear wrote that the union would have to be active in whatever medium journalists find themselves working, in order to protect its members' rights at work and maintain journalistic quality.

Dear also rejected suggestions that the union is less relevant in the era of media convergence: "There are those who say that professional journalism won't survive the 'information revolution'. We've been hearing that refrain for a century. Every new technology - radio, television, the internet - was predicted to spell the death knell for the NUJ."

Lemann "As journalism moves to the Internet, move reporters there"

His view that the media landscape is changing is not arguable. We have witnessed how the new technologies are reshaping the world of journalism.

However, it cannot be a satisfactory answer for those who are worried about professional standards in journalism. Contrary to his argument, they are worried because the changes in media landscape threaten the standards in journalism.

Furthermore, the large number of J-bloggers, professional journalists who are blogging, does not support the argument that bloggers are journalists. They may be who Nicholas Lemann had in mind when arguing in the New Yorker article Amateur Hour: “As journalism moves to the Internet, the main project ought to be moving reporters there, not stripping them away.”

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Top 10 Stories of 2007

At this time of the year, news organizations release their own version of Top 10 Stories of the Year. Browsing these lists reminds us of not only what happened for the past year but each newsroom’s distinctive angle for news selection.

The process of selecting top 10 stories varies. Some newsrooms ask readers what they think was the biggest story, others run a special team for the selection. In most cases, reporters vote.

Let’s have a look at a variety of lists!!

Virginia Tech massacre - the top story of the US

The US editors and news directors in the Associated Press’ annual vote chose Virginia Tech massacre of 32 people by a student gunman as the top story of 2007. The story received 82 first place votes out of 271 ballots cast for the top 10 stories. AP said: “It was the worst mass shooting in U.S. history.” The war in Iraq, the top story of 2006, ranked third this year. No. 2 story is the mortgage crisis.
1. VIRGINIA TECH KILLINGS
2. MORTGAGE CRISIS
3. IRAQ WAR
4. OIL PRICES
5. CHINESE EXPORTS
6. GLOBAL WARMING
7. MISSISSIPI RIVER BRIDGE COLLAPSE
8. PRESIDENTIAL CAMPAIGN
9. IMMIGRATION DEBATE
10. IRAN'S NUCLEAR PROGRAM

Madleine McCann - the most searched story in the UK

One of the easiest ways to pick top 10 stories is just counting the online clicks for stories. The Times Online did so. “Revealed: Israel plans nuclear strike on Iran” recorded the top story with approximately 650,000 views. Such an online version of top 10 tends to include more soft news than those based on reporters’ votes.

1. Revealed: Israel plans nuclear strike on Iran (655,000 views)
2. Scientists hail frozen smoke as material that will change world (650,000 views)
3. Madeleine McCann: the key questions (535,000 views)
4. Alan Greenspan claims Iraq war was really for oil (530,000 views)
5. Israelis blew apart Syrian nuclear cache (520,000 views)
6. Sex ban on the Airbus A380 (485,000 views)
7. An experiment that hints we are wrong on climate change (480,000 views)
8. Rally champion Colin McRae dies with son in helicopter crash (475,000 views)
9. Could nude pictures of Vanessa Hudgens sink Disneys billion-dollar franchise? (430,000 views)
10. Skydiver charged with murder after love rival fell 13000ft to her death (420,000 views)

Times Online also released the most wanted SEARCHE TERMS of 2007.

1. Madeleine McCann
2. Anna Nicole Smith
3. Airbus
4. American Idol
5. China
6. Spice Girls Reunion
7. Kate Middleton
8. Fopp
9. Global Warming
10. Afghanistan

Vladimir Putin - TIME's Person of the Year

The US magazine Time annually picks the Person of the Year. The magazine describes TIME's Person of the Year as this:

“It is not and never has been an honor. It is not an endorsement. It is not a popularity contest. At its best, it is a clear-eyed recognition of the world as it is and of the most powerful individuals and forces shaping that world—for better or for worse.”

In 2006, Time chose “You” as the Person of the Year. “You” meant those who participated in the Web 2.0 Internet to make the online world more productive and innovative.

This year’s candidates included the Nobel laureate Al Gore, the Harry Porter writer J. K. Rolling and the Chinese President Hu Jintao. Time’s pick went to the Russian President Vladimir Putin.

“After the fall of the Berlin Wall, Russia receded from the American consciousness as we became mired in our own polarized politics. And it lost its place in the great game of geopolitics, its significance dwarfed not just by the U.S. but also by the rising giants of China and India.

"That view was always naive. Russia is central to our world—and the new world that is being born. It is the largest country on earth; it shares a 2,600-mile (4,200 km) border with China; it has a significant and restive Islamic population; it has the world's largest stockpile of weapons of mass destruction and a lethal nuclear arsenal; it is the world's second largest oil producer after Saudi Arabia; and it is an indispensable player in whatever happens in the Middle East.

"For all these reasons, if Russia fails, all bets are off for the 21st century. And if Russia succeeds as a nation-state in the family of nations, it will owe much of that success to one man, Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin.”

Murdoch Buys Wall Street Journal - the top media story in the US

The Editor and Publisher, a US journal covering the newspaper industry, picks top 10 newspaper industry stories. This year’s No. 1 went to “Murdoch Buys Dow Jones”.

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Is This the Future of Newspapers?

The US journal Editor & Publisher posted on its website on December 1 an AP article with a title: New Device May 'Kindle' Interest in Reading E-Newspaper on Daily Commute.

It said: “Making a successful reader for electronic books is one of the toughest tasks in consumer electronics. Many have tried and all have failed. This week, Amazon.com Inc. released the Kindle, the best attempt yet at toppling the book.”

Details of Kindle

Kindle contains a cell-phone modem, through which it can download books, magazines, newspapers and blogs anywhere Sprint Nextel Corp.'s network has coverage.

Amazon has 90,000 e-books in its store. A full-length best seller takes less than a minute to arrive on the device, if you have a good signal. The text shows up on the Kindle's six-inch screen, which uses "electronic ink" technology.

Eleven newspapers are available, including The New York Times, The Washington Post and San Jose Mercury News. If you subscribe to one, it arrives automatically on the Kindle in the morning, ready to read on your commute.

They're devoid of graphics and have very few photos, but it's much easier to handle than a broadsheet paper on a crowded subway.

Minority Report Realizes?

Stephen Spielberg’s science fiction film Minority Report illustrated so well how newspapers will look like in the future.

When Tom Cruise gets on an underground train, a passenger’s electronic USA Today downloads new articles including the story about Tom.

The newspaper is a plastic video screen thin, foldable, and wireless. People call the technology “e-paper”.

The Future of Newspaper?

Amazon’s Kindle must look primitive when compared to “the USA Today in 2054” depicted in the movie, but may be the first step toward the era of paper-free news.

The author of the AP article criticized the device in some technical perspectives such as short battery duration. He said: “If not, we'll have to wait for the next attempt at making a great e-book reader. Like a great white whale of the electronics world, it seems ever elusive.”

However, search with “Kindle” at Amazon.com. You will see a page illustrating a new wireless reading device named “Kindle”, but you cannot buy it at the moment because they are sold out despite its price of $399 and horrible design.

This shows that a huge demand on a replacement for “news in paper” exists, and means that journalists have another technology for which they have to devise a new news format.

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AFP invests in citizen journalism

Another news site based on citizen journalism accepted an investment offer from a global mainstream medium, AFP.

Scooplive relaunched on November 29 with a new name, Citizenside, and money from AFP.

What is Citizenside?

CitizenSide was created in 2006 in Paris, France, by three founders, Julien Robert, Philippe Checinski and Matthieu Stefani. Julien took responsibility for website creation in terms of technology and Philippe had specialty in finance and marketing.

It was Matthieu who had something to do with journalism. He was part of the team that has launched the successful free daily newspaper Metro in France and joined the HQ of Metro International in London.

CitizenSide is such a platform where anyone can participate with his or her own news contents as Ohmynews in Korea (Even its motto With Scooplive, we are all reporters! reminds me of that of Ohmynews Every citizen is a reports).

It introduces itself as “the first photo and video scoop marketplace on the Internet” and aims at creating the world's largest amateur and/or independent reporters community with a commercial goal.

How it works?

If citizens send in photos and videos, Citizenside offers them to journalists worldwide who have already signed up for the site. There are two ways of distributing the citizen contents.

If the content is a scoop, it is auctioned off on the website and sold to the highest-bidding media in each participating country, who benefits from a 30-day exclusivity.

If the content is an interesting current news document, it is on sale on the site’s image bank at a fixed rate, and is available to media all over the globe.

Each reporter or seller retains the copyright of his photos. He grants the buyers a license to use his material and grants Scooplive a license to market them. The seller earns up to 85% on the final sale price of his documents.

Why AFP invests in Citizenside?

According to the AFP statement, the French news agency bought a 30 percent stake in Citizenside and will not take part in its editorial decisions.


AFP hopes this investment will allow it to get closer to readers and to bring the contents produced by citizens to its news media customers.

Pierre Louette, President of AFP, said: “This is for us a purely commercial and technical experiment in the Web 2.0 field, to help our clients, mainly in the media field.”

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Women in Journalism

Press Gazette reported on November 28 that Women in Journalism (WIJ) relaunched its website.

Women in Journalism is a networking, campaigning, training and social organisation for women journalists who work across all the written media, from newspapers and magazines to the new media.

WIJ was established 12 years ago. It grew out of a demand for women to be more effectively represented at senior level in newspapers and magazines, and has since evolved into a forum for women in journalism at all levels.

The organization boasts its contribution to a significant increase in the number of women editors and deputy editors in national newspapers.

It also organizes bi-monthly seminars to give women journalists chances to think about 'How to ask for more money', 'What features editors want', 'Get your own column' and 'How to write a bestseller'.

10 years ago in Korea

I began working as a reporter in 1996 at the Kukmin Daily in Seoul. The Kukmin recruited 6 reporters in that year including myself, a half of whom were female. Such a ratio of men to women was unprecedented in the male-dominating industry.

The imbalance in gender was the problem of not only mains stream media but also new media that started to appear on the Internet in the early 2000s. The citizen reporters of Ohmynews were also a male-dominating group. According to the company’s 2003 statistics, 76.6% of them were male.

New Trend?

However, the trend has changed for the past decade. More and more women has applied for jobs in the media for the past years. Their competitiveness surpasses that of male applicants in most cases.

Therefore, Korean media have difficulty in recruiting male reporters because fewer of them defeat women competitors at examinations for recruiting journalists. Some companies give advantages to male applicants to strike a gender balance.

I remember that I was surprised by the dominant number of women at the first meeting of Sheffield University’s new MA journalism students in last September.

I told one of the female students how I was surprised but she replied “It’s natural. Whichever country or university you go to, journalism is a women’s subject.”

Why Women Love Journalism?

Elizabeth Day, a female reporter for The Sunday Telegraph, contributed an article to British Journalism Review in 2004 (Vol. 15, No. 2, pages 21-25). Its title was Why Women Love Journalism?

I think she is the right person to answer this question. She was named Young Journalist of the Year at the British Press Awards in March, 2004, thanks to both her hunger for exclusives and her stylish writing. Please read her article!

Two Realities

I agree to the argument that women are ill-represented in senior posts of media industry. But the new trends that I witnessed in Seoul and Sheffield are sure to reflect the reality.

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Are Bloggers Journalists? NUJ Said “Yes”

A 20-year-old blogger became a formal member of the National Union of Journalists (NUJ) this week.

The NUJ general secretary said that he is the Union’s first member with a job title of “blogger”.

Does this mean that the journalists’ organization formally recognizes blogging as an area of journalism?

Who is that blogger?

He is Conrad Quilty-Harper (in the photo) , a history and politics student at the University of Hull. But he is currently taking a year off to work for Mahalo, a website that defines itself “a human powered search engine”.

Mahalo, based in Santa Monica, California, hires people to select best links and produce spam-free search results for popular keywords. Conrad is one of those hired.

A blogger paid by AOL

He also writes for Engadget.com, which is a popular technology news blog. It consists of the works of several bloggers. Conrad is one of those bloggers who are paid by Engadget.com. T

The blog is a member of Weblogs Inc., a blog network purchased by AOL in 2005. So, technically Conrad is working for a MSM (main stream media) company.

“I was the first questioner at a Steve Jobs press conference”

He has previously blogged at Joystiq.com and TUAW.com, and has vigorously participated in a large number of Flickr groups.

Conrad boasts that he threw the first question to the Apple CEO Steve Jobs at a press conference in the last September where reporters from major media including BBC, FT, and the Guardian attended.

Apply – Rejected – Complain – Accepted

In the first place, his application for membership was rejected by NUJ in the last October. NUJ replied his email application saying:

“While you are studying full-time you will not be eligible for full or temporary membership, and as you are not doing a journalism/media course, you are therefore not eligible for NUJ student membership.”

Conrad complained to NUJ that he is currently not a student because he suspended his study for a year to work as but a “full-time” blogger. Then, NUJ invited him to its London Freelance branch meeting and decided to admit him as a member.

The first member who earns his living from blogging

The NUJ general secretary Jeremy Dear said: “Whilst we have hundreds, if not thousands of members who write blogs, this is the first person who earns their entire living solely from freelance blogging”

He added in his blog: “Who says we're not attracting new media workers? Membership in new media was up almost 11% over the past year.”

Is blogging journalism?

When the NUJ rejected Conrad’s application for a membership, the issue was not his work, blogging, but his status as a student. The Union approved his application as soon as it confirmed that he is not a student at least technically.

It seems that the NUJ had no objection to the idea of including bloggers in the category of journalists, as long as they are “full-time professional” ones. This means that NUJ has already regarded a blog as a journalistic media where people can get news with quality.

In Conrad’s case, few reason can be found to reject his application. His specialty in technology and the quality of the information he provides have long been highly valued. Above all, he devotes his entire working hours and energy to news reporting.

A critic to citizen journalism, Nicholas Lemann, wrote for the New Yorker on August 7, 2006 that good Internet journalism needs people who do that full time, not “citizens” with day jobs.

Even to his criteria, Conrad will hardly be excluded from the category of journalists. However, His case should not be generalized to put the entire world of blogging under the umbrella of journalism. A significant level of professionalism should be needed.

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Is Google Dangerous?

“Google is hugely dangerous. It now affects everything we do online.

“Google is the number one topic of conversation at News Corp.

“We absolutely can’t afford not to be brilliant on Google News.”

The editor-in-chief of Times Online, Ann Spackman, made these comments at the Society of Editors conference on November 6 in Manchester. She showed her concern about Google during a session entitled the Future Is Ours. She attended the session as a panel to discuss the future of newspapers and made these comments when asked her view on Google. She also said: “Google is the biggest influence on the news business. Its move into DNA is a massive threat.” Her remarks attracted attention from many journalism news sites such as journalism.co.uk, Press Gazette, and greenslade. Why is Ms. Spackman so worried about Google?

Is Google a News Brand?

Google itself produces no news. The search engine just provides its users with news produced by someone else - newspapers, broadcasters, or news sites. It is a platform through which people get access to various news contents. You can click hyperlinks to news stories on Google News pages or search news by key words. But, Google has a function of journalism – news selection!

Thousands of news producers pour countless stories onto Google every day, but its news pages are limited in space. Only a tiny portion of those articles can get a link on it. Especially, if a huge story breaks out, hundreds of different versions of same story rush in. Who choose which story or whose story to appear on the main page of Google News? Google does! Google News pages are designed to have an inverted pyramid structure just as a newspaper does. The more important is a story, the better positioned. Who decides top stories on Google News? Even though far from a news brand, Google does the same thing as the editor-in-chief of the Times does in his newsroom – deciding news value.

I typed “Pakistan” in Google news search window at 12:29 pm on November 9 to catch up with stories about its opposition leader Benazir Bhutto. On the top of my search results was Bhutto under house detention in Pakistan of an American newspaper, San Jose Mercury News. Why does this story of that newspaper come first? It is because of Google search engine’s algorithm.

The Power of Google Algorithm

Ms. Spackman elaborated on why Google is a threat to news business at an interview with Press Gazette after the session was over. She said that newspapers have to optimize their sites for Google not to lose enormous traffic coming from the search engine. News sites depend financially on the advertisement revenue that is hugely influenced by the size of such traffic. If the traffic is highly susceptible to Google, it means that Google has the power to financially control news sites. When Google tweaked its search algorithm last month, WashingtonPost.com was one of several major sites whose PageRank temporarily dropped, she noted. Google also controls a large amount of advertising online, particularly since its acquisition this year of online advertising firm DoubleClick.

Power without Responsibility

Ms. Spackman was asked her view on Google during the conference session by an attendant who described it as "a trusted brand for news", according to journalism.co.uk. If the person reflected the reality as it was, Google's news selection must be regareded by people as a form of journalism. People are getting addicted to it as they have been to a certain brand of newspaper. This means Google can weild influence upon public opinion just as news media do. But it is free from the responsibilities every news medium takes for granted, because it does not produce any news.

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