[news] Online Newspaper Shakes Up Korean Politics

[Gordon Flett]

http://www.nytimes.com/2003/03/06/international/asia/06SEOU.html?tnt
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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."