South Korea: Everyone’s a Journalist
The story of OhmyNews
FRONTLINE/World
I began my career as a newspaper reporter in the late 1990s, just as the Web began to take off. As a staff writer for the San Francisco Chronicle, I use the Internet all the time to dig up documents and track down people. It allows me to do my job better and faster.
But the Web has also forced the media industry to scramble. More and more readers expect to read the news online for free, and the proliferation of bloggers has made content cheap to come by and to create. Every day, I hear bad news about the decline in newspaper readership, about a public loss of faith in the media, about mergers and layoffs.
In 2005, I wrote my first report about OhmyNews, a South Korean online news site founded on the premise that every citizen is a reporter. Watch now >>