It Doesn’t Take Much to Start a Revolution

The prime example in the
world today of the power of the Internet and the Blogosphere to suplant
the established news media as the main source of a nation’s information
is South Korea, where a coalition of blogs and web sites elected a Maverick
president and blew the old line media out of the water. Now they want
to export their success….

SOUTH KOREA’S MEDIA has been turned on its head by an upstart Internet news portal
called OhmyNews. But can its revolutionary brand of citizen reporting and Internet-only
delivery work elsewhere?

OhmyNews is in fact little more than a Web site, edited by Oh and his fellow
editors, and filled by ordinary members of the public–what the left-leaning
Oh calls "citizen reporters"–who submit stories, comments, pictures
and sometimes video by e-mail and from their cellphones. More than 30,000
of them regularly post pieces, and many more add their comments. A team of
editors
sift through the material, weeding out potential legal problems and rewriting
for readability, while a handful of full-time reporters add their own stories
on the top events of the day

For now, the most lasting lesson Oh and his team can pass
on is that it doesn’t take much to start a revolution. "We can do
anything so long as we have an Internet connection," he says.

from the Far Eastern Economic Review