Q: What do you think about the criticism that the main articles are written by full-time reporters, while the names of citizen reporters are exploited? A: For instance, Chung Joo-young (founder and former president of the Hyundai Corporations) died. It is very difficult for an article like this to be covered by a citizen reporter quickly, isn't it? It's natural for full-time reporters to cover these stories. But if 250 articles come up a day, 200 of them are by citizen reporters. So, as to quantity, still 80 percent are being written by citizen reporters. But from the aspect of placement, if you only consider which articles are shown on the top, this percentage would decrease. But the thing we should think about here is that most full-time reporters inside were once citizen reporters. Among them, about 80 percent. So people who wrote well in the past, these people have now become the regular army from guerrillas. So we don't have to see things negatively, I think. Q: What are the criteria for selecting citizen reporters' articles? A: They might be similar to those for ordinary articles. Beginning with current events, how much sympathy the articles will arouse, how lively they are and how much social impact the articles will have. Q: What are the criteria for the paper OhmyNews? A: The publication process for our paper version is very simple. The concept of it is "Best of OhmyNews" rather than doing something new. It has the meaning of recycling by selecting things that were on there and would be valuable even after being transferred to paper. Thus, it is not that we pour major manpower into it. Q: Are the topics that OhmyNews covers similar to those of other newspapers? A: We focus on politics, society and citizens. Other topics such as culture are covered by the citizen reporters. Q: Are you willing to head in a new direction? A: We are trying to do Internet TV regularly. That is, we are trying to post the motion pictures that citizen reporters have recorded, just as they post articles. Nowadays, we are doing this in our spare time, we are trying to regularize it. Q: Do you have any obstacles to further growth? A: Since we have become a little bit bigger, it seems like the existing mainstream media are holding us in check. For instance, it seems that they exaggerate a small mistake that they might have ignored before, exaggerate the ill effects of the citizen reporter system, or intend to weaken the influence of OhmyNews, but in terms of those things we could ignore them. Q: How much is your revenue and what is the source? A: Our income is about 2.6 billion won (about $2.2 million) a month and expenses are about 2.5 billion won (about $2.1 million), so 10 million won (about $8,525) in the black per month. Seventy percent of the overall income comes from advertisements. Q: What do you think of the future of Internet newspapers in Korea and the world? A: I think that paper newspapers will continuously have a certain level of influence, yet slowly but continuously their authority will decrease. And I think the influence of Internet media will gradually expand. Q: Can you give some advice to those who model OhmyNews, including JanJan of Japan? A: For something like OhmyNews to succeed, the participation of citizens is essential. I mean that the network of the Internet alone is not enough, and also the mere dissatisfaction with the conventional press is not enough. Also, the enthusiasm of the leader alone is not enough. It would be good to research how to make citizens participate and prepare on time. You can never succeed only by pouring in lots of money. Why did citizens participate even though we didn't give them much money? But when someone writes an article, he gets paid only 1,000 won (about 85 cents), whether he writes 10 pages or 100 pages. Isn't that even less than one U.S. dollar? Nevertheless, he wrote an article for OhmyNews by investing his time and energy. Then why does he do it? They should research why such participation was possible and make it possible in their own countries, but they could not make it by spending money. I understand there is not much participation by citizens in JanJan, this might be the central difficulty. Q: Any final comment? A: In my opinion, nowadays journalism is changing. The form of 20th century journalism and the form of 21st century journalism will be fundamentally different. For 21st century journalism, if a reader wants to, he can convert himself into a reporter and this is realized through the Internet. Someone might think that this is the unique situation of Korea and OhmyNews, but I think it is not. Even in countries where they don't have OhmyNews, citizens act as reporters whether they recognize it or not. Through Yahoo discussion space or the Readers' Opinions section of The New York Times, they are already affecting professional journalists. In the old days, didn't readers send their letters to newspaper companies and the companies edited them? It is not true now. Now citizens are publishing one-person newspapers -- blogs. Where professional reporters once exercised their influence exclusively, now they compete with citizens, so professional journalists could be in trouble if they still try to confront general readers with their authority and arrogance. Now professional journalists have to survive not only competition among themselves, but also from that with ordinary netizens. The only way to compete now is through the quality of their articles. That means that the age of competing through the name card "I am a New York Times reporter" has gone. When a New York Times reporter writes an article and an ordinary citizen -- whether he is a professor or a neighbor -- writes an article criticizing it splendidly, then the citizen becomes the winner. So it is not important that I am a reporter from an authoritative newspaper company at all. I mean, now the quality of articles is important. Thus, it is necessary that the reporters quickly figure out how the world is changing and that they change themselves along with it.
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