Citizen Journalism

This lens intends to offer a limited but precise meaning for the term 'citizen journalism', based on what is happening with OhmyNews in South Korea. Here up to 40,000 citizens send in reports to professional editors who check facts and rewrite reports in combinations. The photo is of Oh  Yeon Ho, who founded OhmyNews. The positioning of stories is decided by editors and feedback from readers. In other countries this approach may take other forms. In the UK people send in pictures to news channels, for example. However these kind of contributions are not the same as citizen journalism. The point is that citizens have a voice, they can decide on an editorial approach. I live in the UK where there was recently a conference organised around 'We Media'. This got a lot of attention but there is not much agreement on what 'We' means. Now some mainstream media have decided to set up awards for what they call 'citizen journalism' but they don't really seem to like the idea unless limited to small contributions. I have now done about 50 reports for OhmyNews International, their English language site. They use the term 'citizen reporter' to describe people like me. So the term 'citizen journalism' describes the full process by which the reports get on the site. The international site has a small number of reports compared to the Korean, but there are now enough from the UK to form occasional groups.  The info on this lens will be as objectively true as you could reasonably expect, but you now know where I am coming from.