Everybody can be a writer!

The way we read news has been totally changed. Until only 10 years ago, we had read news as writers and editors showed to us. But now, we choose news to read among a great number of them, evaluate and react to them directly, and even generate news personally, which sometimes become sources of major media’s news.

When we want to see what is going on in the world, we would rather open internet portal news websites such as Google news, or internet websites of major media. Although most news on those websites are written by professional writers and the way they are shown to us are organized by the websites’ editors, we have more rights to choose what to read, and what is better is that we can give them feedbacks personally and directly by posting comments. Also, as some websites arrange news on the screen according to the ranks of the number they has been read, the “edition” of news are organized not by professional editors but by readers.

The most remarkable part of the “revolution of news” is that we generate news in person, which usually happens in the social news section. Although this kind of news is not usually offering technical analysis and tends to be just thrown to netizens, they are providing news that is something hands-on experience and that is easy to be overlooked by major media. Furthermore, some of them sometimes become major news deeply re-dealt with by major media. It is the best example that a blogger posted a short video that contained violent incident in a high school on a blogger news website, and then it evoked social attention on school violence, which led major media to deal with the issue with the video as a main source.

With regard to this trend, there is an internet news website, in South Korea, claiming to stand for “Citizen Journalism”; OhmyNews was initiated in 2000 with the catch phrase, “all citizens are writers”. The news of this website consists of 50% of professional writers’ and the other 50% of registered citizen writers’. By far, about 600 citizen writers from about 60 countries have joined in it. In addition, there is “netizen edition” aside from basic edition by the professional editors.
OhmyNews – www.ohmynews.com (Korean Edition)
english.ohmynews.com (International Edition)