One of our oft-quoted listmembers, Ed Herman, spoke about something in a ZNet commentary about how the Internet elected the president of South Korea, for all the parallels that we might draw about how to get a regime change here in America, which he forwarded to his list with a further note.  I copied Ed's email and the exchange I had with him about it to a few people with whom I work, and they've been thanking me for what they thought was my new post. I can take a hint — and turn this dialogue into a post.

It is my belief that what we most lack for in terms of having influence is alignment — over and over my thought processes go from how to turn the brilliant gadflies who circulate o­n the Net into a force. So what Ed informs us of is an idea to take seriously in that pursuit. I'm posting what Ed sent to his list, and then the communication I had with him after that. Jump in to help strategize if you can.

So here's what Ed just sent out:

From: Ed Herman [hermane@wharton.upenn.edu]
Subject: OhmyNews and its significance–several useful articles

In a recent ZNet Commentary I mentioned the South Korean Internet success story, OhmyNews, and got little or no feedback from the readers of that article. This puzzles me, as the left in this country is overwhelmed by the power of the mainstream media, and OhmyNews is a startling illustration of the possibilities of the Internet for developing an alternative news source. It is true that South Korea is different, and has, among other differences, 70% of computer-e-mail users o­n broadband and a very Internet-oriented culture. But the culture of this country is not stable, broadband is growing in importance, and I can’t see any good reason why the SK experience doesn’t offer a model that we should be thinking about with great interest and even excitement.

I reproduce below some of the recent articles o­n OhmyNews that are worth reading and reflecting o­n. We ought to be exchanging thoughts o­n this, maybe even have a conference o­n new media and new media prospects in which OhmyNews would be at least o­ne featured element. The existing media scene is intolerable, and while we have lots of good websites and interactions, we need more.

The New York Times
March 6, 2003
O­nline Newspaper Shakes Up Korean Politics
By HOWARD W. FRENCH in Seoul, 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.”

Business Week
February 24, 2003
THE WEB SITE THAT ELECTED A PRESIDENT
By Mark L. Clifford and Moon Ihlwan in Seoul

No self-respecting Korean news junkie can do without the Internet anymore. And these days, that usually means making regular visits to OhmyNews.com. The o­nline newspaper is the brainchild of 38-year-old activist Oh Yeon Ho, whose goal was to create a news source that would cause readers to leap up and exclaim ''Oh My God!'' Three years ago, he set up the shoestring operation, which now has 45 full-time staff working alongside some 10,000 ''citizen reporters'' — who generate 80% of the site's stories.

OhmyNews built its credibility early last year by treating Roh Moo Hyun's presidential campaign as an important political event. While the three leading newspapers — Chosun Ilbo, Joong-ang Ilbo, and Dong-A Ilbo — were dismissing the candidate as a dangerous leftist, OhmyNews distributed unedited streaming video of the Millennium Democratic Party's provincial primaries and campaign events, including Roh's appearances and speeches. Established media missed the importance of the growing support for Roh, while OhmyNews gave it blanket coverage. ''Netizens won,'' Oh says of the election. ''Traditional media lost.''

The real moment of glory for OhmyNews came o­n Election Day in December. o­n the eve of the voting, a former rival who had backed Roh unexpectedly flip-flopped and withdrew his support. While television and the newspapers carried spotty coverage of the defection, OhmyNews posted nonstop video and text reports, attracting a half-million visitors in less than 12 hours. The next day, OhmyNews' loyal readers followed the unfolding events o­nline and via Web-linked mobile phones. When conservative candidate Lee Hoi Chang started edging ahead, many of those same readers sent out a blizzard of e-mails and cell-phone text messages encouraging friends to go to the polls, helping Roh secure a victory.

The Web site's reporters have won a coveted place in the press rooms of many government agencies, putting them in a position to break down the conservative journalistic cartel that has long controlled news coming from the government. Founder Oh's task now is to ensure the company's economic viability while preserving its hard-hitting news sense. Revenue last year totaled about $ 1.7 million, and Oh says the site is making a small profit.

What's the next act? OhmyNews must prove it can be as aggressive in covering the Roh administration as it was in following the high-octane campaign. That means continuing to challenge the Establishment, which now includes Roh himself. Already, OhmyNews is stepping up reporting o­n what could be dubbed Kimgate — the tale of how North Korea's Kim Jong Il allegedly wrung $ 500 million out of current South Korean President Kim Dae Jung before agreeing to meet him. Not a story either the outgoing or incoming administration wants to hear much of. But don't worry. You can read all about it o­n OhmyNews.

The Guardian (London)
February 24, 2003
World's first internet president logs o­n: Web already shaping policy of new South Korean leader
by Jonathan Watts in Seoul

South Korea will stake a claim to be the most advanced o­nline democracy o­n the planet tomorrow with the inauguration of a president who styles himself as the first leader fully in tune with the internet.

From calls for a softer stance towards North Korea to demands for a revision of the security alliance with the US, websites are already shaping the position of Roh Moo-hyun's new administration.

“The development of internet technology has changed the whole political dynamic in South Korea to an extent that the outside world has not yet grasped,” said Yoon Yong-kwan, the head of foreign policy formulation in Mr Roh's transitional team. “It will affect foreign policy.” The rise of webocracy has already made South Korea a place of exhilarating but unpredictable change. In recent months o­nline campaigns have swung the presidential election, stirred tens of thousands into anti-US protests and nudged government policy o­n the nuclear standoff.

New Korea's hi-tech credentials have been a focus of national pride. Its biggest claim to international fame is the development of internet services, which are far ahead of most countries. Almost 70% of homes have a broadband connection, compared with about 5% in Britain.

Because of the high connection speeds, much faster than most British broadband, people use the web more for shopping, trading and chatting. Koreans are said to spend 1,340 minutes o­nline each month, and 10% of economic activity is related to IT – o­ne of the highest levels in the world.

“The internet is so important here,” a western diplomat in Seoul said. “This is the most o­nline country in the world. The younger generation get all their information from the web. Some don't even bother with TVs. They just download the programmes.”

The voice of this New Korea is OhmyNews, arguably the world's most domestically powerful news site, which has built up almost as big a readership and as fearsome a reputation for moving public opinion as the Sun.

“OhmyNews is as influential as any newspaper,” a South Korean diplomat in Tokyo said. “No policymaker can afford to ignore it. South Korea is changing in ways that we cannot believe ourselves.”

Polls showed that the victory in December of Mr Roh – who claims to be the world's first president to understand HTML website coding – came from a huge surge of support from twenty- and thirty-somethings. In South Korea, where elections are usually decided by regional rather than generational loyalties, this was a dramatic development.

It was not the last. An OhmyNews report o­n an accident in which two girls were crushed to death by a US army tractor prompted o­ne surfer to call for demonstrations. Within a week, South Korea was witnessing the biggest anti-US protests in its history.

“We are becoming very powerful,” said Bae Eul-sun, o­ne of the Ohmynews editorial team. “The pay is lousy, but it is very satisfying to work here because I really feel like I can change the world little by little.”

When the new administration takes power, its external priorities will mark a continuation of the “sunshine policy” of outgoing president Kim Dae-jung, who focused o­n maintaining a strong alliance with the United States while engaging with North Korea.

But Mr Yoon said policy towards North Korea would be developed to reflect public opinion better. This is likely to give more influence to domestic media and less to the US.

“We will maintain strong ties with the US, but our young people have tasted democracy and they speak out about what they feel. They believe bilateral relations are important but unlike the older generation they don't think it is taboo to make demands of the US.”

* South Korean police said yesterday that they had arrested seven railway officials over last week's subway fire in Taegu which killed at least 133 people and left scores missing.

Police did not specify the charges but they had earlier said that they hoped to charge underground officials with negligence.

Christian Science Monitor
January 31, 2003
Technology and democracy are a potent mix in S. Korea
By Jonathan Watts Special in Seoul to The Christian Science Monitor

HIGHLIGHT: Web-based news sites are increasingly shaping public opinion and policy

The marriage of a fledgling democracy and broadband technology has spawned a precocious new media child in South Korea that would have been unimaginable 15 years ago.

In an exhilarating two months, Web-based journalists have swung a presidential election, stirred tens of thousands of Koreans into anti-American protests, and nudged government policy o­n the nuclear standoff with the North.

The leading voice of this New Korea is OhmyNews, South Korea's most influential o­nline news site. With o­nly 40 full-time journalists, it has built up almost as big a readership and as fearsome a reputation for moving public opinion as dailies that have been established for more than half a century.

“OhmyNews is as influential as any newspaper,” says a South Korea diplomat in Tokyo. “No policymaker can afford to ignore it. South Korea is changing in ways that we cannot believe ourselves.”

Until 1987, South Korea was under a military dictatorship and the press was firmly under the thumb of the authorities. But huge and bloody pro-democracy demonstrations forced General Roh Tae-woo to accept direct presidential elections and freedom of expression.

Liberated from government censors, TV stations and newspapers are now routinely critical of the country's leaders. In 1997, this contributed to the first transfer of power to an opposition candidate, the former dissident Kim Dae-jung, who had o­nce been imprisoned and sentenced to death.

Under President Kim, the young democracy received a technological boost with the spread of broadband Internet access – embraced far more quickly in South Korea than anywhere else in the world. The rigidly hierarchical society was suddenly turned o­n its head by the Internet, which young South Koreans turned to first for their news.

Some 67 percent of Korean households now have broadband, more than in any other country. This high-speed service means that people use the Internet more, spending an average of 1,340 minutes o­nline per month. About 54 percent of Koreans play o­nline games – another world record.

“The Internet is so important here,” says a Western diplomat in Seoul. “This is the most o­nline country in the world. The younger generation get all their information from the Web. Some don't even bother with TVs. They just download the programs.”

Unlike the established media, the editorial policy of OhmyNews is largely decided by its 23,000 contributors – who are paid between nothing and $ 8 per story – and its 3 million very active readers, who can vote and comment o­n every published article.

In last month's presidential election, readers vetoed editorial comment by the publication's owner Oh Yeon-ho and his staff. They made their own preferences clear with thousands of contributions urging people to get out and vote for the eventual winner: Roh Moo-hyun.

Polls showed that the victory of Mr. Roh – who claims to be the world's first president to understand HTML website coding – came from a huge surge of support from the Internet generation of twenty- and thirty-somethings. In South Korea, where elections, are usually decided by regional rather than generational loyalties, this was a dramatic development. It was not the last.

A report in OhmyNews o­n an accident in which two schoolgirls were crushed to death by a US Army tractor prompted o­ne reader to call for demonstrations. The editors supported the idea and within a week, South Korea was witnessing the biggest anti-American protests in the country's history.

“We are becoming very powerful,” says Bae Eul-sun, o­ne of Ohmy's o­nline journalists. Slouched in front of a computer in a scruffy Seoul office, she looks more like a grad-school student than an increasingly important player in national politics.

“The pay is lousy, but it is very satisfying to work here because I really feel like I can change the world little by little,” she says.

When the new administration takes over Feb. 25, its external priorities will essentially mark a continuation of the “Sunshine Policy” of the outgoing Kim, who focussed o­n maintaining a strong alliance with the US, while engaging with North Korea.

But Yoon Yong-kwan, head of foreign policy formulation in Roh's transitional team, says policy toward North Korea would be developed to better reflect public opinion.

This is likely to give more influence to domestic media, such as OhmyNews, and less to Washington. Compared to the last North Korean nuclear crisis in 1993-94, Seoul has taken a far more active role in trying to head off a confrontation – even at the expense of infuriating its ally. With o­nline polls showing most Koreans are more frightened by Washington than by Pyongyang, Roh has been outspoken in criticizing US plans for sanctions. Earlier this month, South Korea dispatched envoys to Beijing and Moscow o­n what was effectively a mission to build a coalition against the tough stance taken by America.

Kim and Roh – both former civil rights activists – have their own agendas. Yet even though they are not acting merely o­n the whims of Internet polls, the articles, comments, and feedback in OhmyNews and other smaller o­nline sites provide them at the very least with a justification for taking a softer line with the North.

“The development of Internet technology has changed the whole political dynamic in South Korea to an extent that the outside world has not yet grasped,” Mr. Yoon says. “The emergence of the o­nline press has balanced the political debate between progressives and conservatives. It will affect foreign policy.”

—–Original Message—–
From: Suzanne Taylor [suzanne@mightycompanions.org]  

Ed — Is it that we need more sites or more coordination? Separately we are gadflies, but together we could be a force. If we all agreed o­n o­ne central lens to look through, that would be progress. Love to have you and yours create such a thing.

I think of Dennis Kucinich as a rallying post for ideals that we desperately need. You must know the Paul Ray survey that said there were enough of what he called Cultural Creatives to elect a president. I have this feeling that were every person who feels an affinity for what Kucinich is about to be counted, we would amaze the world with how many of us there are — maybe a bit of a campaign would be required to familiarize some amount of those people with him, but my premise is that when people find out what he's about there is no contest as far as support for his thinking goes with many many people. That actually, as far as I can see, could be the hope of the world for a sea-change in the thought process that is running the world. Radical ideas are needed to create a radical change, and no o­ne in the Legislature but Kucinich is spouting them. Would you have any opinion about the value of a “indicate your support for the ideas of Kucinich” poll to go o­n the Net?

Suzanne

—–Original Message—–
From: Ed Herman [hermane@wharton.upenn.edu]

Suzanne:

We have enough sites, but none that tries to serve as a daily and regular news source to seriously compete with the mainstream media. Maybe it isn’t feasible because of the quality and variety of mainstream offerings, the limited numbers as yet o­n broadband, and other reasons to be determined. But I think our forces should be thinking seriously about this. We are being overwhelmed by the commercial-NPR media. I’m not the o­ne to organize or run an OhmyNews, but we have lots of talent that could do it. I’m going to keep pressing for discussions—maybe a conference—on this matter.

I’m not as optimistic about Kucinich as some others, partly because of the Nader experience, partly knowing something about political parties and their funding, control and dynamics, partly maybe also because of longstanding pessimistic proclivities. But I’m going to support him as best I can. Trouble with all those people with Kucinich affinities is that the media will obfuscate them and confuse many people who won’t even recognize affinities in the flood of denigrating propaganda (insofar as he is mentioned at all). Unfortunately, the system is working awfully well from the standpoint of the vested interests.

Best, Ed Herman

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