OhmyNews

Part of the reason why Korean president Roh Moo-hyun was elected was supposedly due to the power of online media. More specifically, the power of OhmyNews, a free online new service.

At the peak of the 2002 elections, the site was said to have registered 20 million page views a day.

According to Howard French's 2003 article Online News Service Flourishes in Korea, the online newspaper began with only four employees. It was started by Oh Yeon Ho, described as a "lifelong journalistic rabble rouser who wrote for underground progressive magazines during the long years of dictatorship here."

Its name OhmyNews is 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.

The electronic newspaper's concept was to rely mostly on contributions from readers all over the country who sent dispatches about everything from local happenings and personal musings to national politics. Only 20 per cent of the paper each day is written by staff journalists. A computer check in 2003 showed that there were over 10,000 other bylines.

The newspaper dealt with questions of objectivity and accuracy by grading articles according to their content. Those that were presented as straight news were fact-checked by editors. Writers were paid small amounts, which varied according to how the stories were ranked, using forestry terminology, from "kindling" to "rare species."

Oh who insisted that his name had nothing to do with the newspaper said that his goal was "to say farewell to 20th century Korean journalism, with the concept that every citizen is a reporter."

"The professional news culture has eroded our journalism, 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," Oh added.

As French observed: "The kind of immediacy this brand of journalism can bring to a story was shown in late January (2003) 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."

But one of the greatest impact OhmyNews had was when it reported the deaths of two schoolgirls who were ran over by a U.S. Army armored vehicle. The reports were widely seen as forcing the hand of the mainstream media to pay attention to a story that "conservative traditional here suggests they might have been inclined to ignore."

"The rest is, as they say, history: A series of demonstrations against the army's presence here snowballed ... becoming a huge national movement that many see as having propelled the candidacy of Roh," French wrote.

The new president was, until then, a relative unknown, and third in a field of three major candidates. Little surprise that after Roh was elected, he granted OhmyNews his first media interview.

Incidentally, Oh was also the first to break the story on the No Gun Ri incident in 1994 when he was a "little known freelance journalist." Occurring in 1950 during the Korean War, the incident was a massacre of South Korean refugees by U.S. military forces.

After Oh reported the story, the South Korean media did not pick up the story. But five years later, The Associated Press wrote about the incident, and later even won a Pulitzer prize for its subsequent investigations with U.S. army veterans.

Oh reportedly said: "Once the American media picked up the story, our mainstream newspapers wrote about No Gun Ri as if it was a fresh incident. This made me realize that we have a real imbalance in our media, 80 per cent conservative and 20 per cent liberal, and it needed to be corrected. My goal is 50-50."

So is Oh anywhere near his goal now?