Kate’s Corner

Week 4: Nieman Report: Citizen and Netizen Journalism

Posted on August 7th, 2007 by kmburb.
Categories: Uncategorized.

There are many fascinating stories about the inception and use of citizen journalism (mainly in relation to Ohmynews) all over the world.

Oh Yeon-ho, the founder of Ohmynews, believed that “Citizen Reporters can be called guerrillas, because they are not professional and regulars and they post news from perspectives uniquely their own, not those of the conservative establishment.”

At first I thought that “guerrillas” would only be necessary in a media environment such as what exists in South Korea, not here in Australia. And then I thought, or are they? Maybe we do need guerrilla citizen reporters here.

Just because I may not be aware of a need to break through any repressive regimes in our own country’s media, that is more likely to be because I am under the influence of the media and do not question the need for further investigative journalism or a more democratic functioning of journalism, rather than there not actually being a need for guerrilla journalists in Australia.

Does Australia need a model of Ohmynews too? Am I just too unaware of what need there is for a more open media in this country?

The concept of the internet being a “laboratory for democracy” is particularly interesting. Imagine if we had enough netizen power to vote in the type of government we really wanted in Australia, just as netizens voted in a new and relatively unknown president in South Korea. We could use the power the internet has given us to a far greater extent if we were really politically inclined to do so, and if we were conscious enough about the issues we face in this country’s media.

As Fiza Fatima Asar writes (in Time to Think: Reflections on the uses and abuses of the media): “We have a great responsibility to ourselves and others to comprehend and promote the truth.” Hopefully this is something citizen journalism will do a lot more of.

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