Note: In June I was hired by the Berkman Center for Internet and Society to write a case study about the effect that the Korean citizen journalism site OhmyNews has had on democracy in that country. I finished the first draft of the report last week. This is the executive summary.

Ever since Tom Paine wrote "Common Sense" in 1776, citizen journalism has been strengthening democracy. By providing an alternative to mainstream media in both content and perspective, citizen journalism keeps people better informed about public issues, allowing them to more intelligently form opinions about public policy and select politicians to represent them. Citizen journalism helps citizens seek their best political interest, the definition of democracy itself.

The Internet has had a dramatic influence on the scope of citizen journalism. It allows for greater participation from both writers and readers by facilitating self-publishing and by diffusing that user generated content across the earth with the click of a mouse. A printing press or television station are no longer necessary if one wishes to reach an audience of millions.

The best way to learn how online citizen journalism can influence democracy is to learn how it already has. Certainly the most prominent example of successful online citizen journalism is the South Korean1 citizen journalism web site OhmyNews. Founded in 1999, and officially launched in 2000, OhmyNews is the brain child of progressive journalist Oh Yeon-Ho. Oh was frustrated by the uni-polar conservative media establishment in Korea and dreamed of creating a site which would allow Korean citizens to report their own news, balancing the conservative media structure dating from the time of the military dictatorships with the more progressive and democratic present.

However, before Oh could achieve this goal, Korea would need to go through significant changes in its Internet infrastructure. Following government reforms that took effect in1999, massive investment went into building a modern telecommunications backbone and training Koreans how to use the Internet. Today, nearly 75% of Koreans are Internet users with high-speed connections. This foundation was essential for the populist user-generated news site that Oh envisioned.

OhmyNews brought together a collection of features that made the service credible, encouraged content generation, and responded to readers' interests. To increase credibility, OhmyNews employs professional editors to filter and fact-check articles submitted by citizen reporters. To generate content, OhmyNews pays reporters up to $20 per story and also instituted a system which allows readers to tip the writers of their favorite articles. In addition, readers are encouraged to give their opinions on stories. Each article has a comments section and readers can click a link to send a message directly to the writer of the story. Among those writers, most are under the age of forty and are male. Many are college students or white collar workers, though housewives also make up a popular contingent.

OhmyNews affects Korean democracy in many ways. On a social level, it gives citizens the power to create culture, a process known as “semiotic democracy”. OhmyNews redefined what it is to be a journalist, and in so doing redefined who creates truth within Korea society. In addition, by giving Korean citizens a more active role in writing history, OhmyNews helped them to make history.

The 2002 Korean presidential election has so far been OhmyNews' crowning achievement. In that year, web-savvy netizens used progressive sites like OhmyNews and the candidate fan site Nosamo to rally support behind dark horse presidential candidate Roh Moo-Hyun. On Election Day, when it seemed that Roh might lose, supporters sent millions of text messages and e-mails to friends asking them to go out and vote. Roh won.

Korea has a strong cultural tradition of citizen activism, reaching back to the aftermath of the Korean War. Yet the success of this last minute get-out-the-vote campaign was not only due to the digital skill of netizens activists. Previous events, like the Red Devil soccer rallies during the 2002 World Cups games and nationwide candlelight vigils, had familiarized great swaths of Korean society with digital organizing techniques. Koreans voters checked web sites and forums for news on Election Day and responded to the digital calls to action. On that day, Korea was a nation of netizens.

The years since the 2002 victory have not been particularly kind to OhmyNews. As its once revolutionary user generated content has become more mainstream, competitors have stolen both advertising dollars and potential users. Financial problems have continued to plague the site, which has had difficulty finding a reliable business model. In addition, allegations of bias towards the now unpopular President Roh have undermined OhmyNews' credibility and the lack of success in exporting the OhmyNews model has been disappointing.

Yet despite these difficulties, citizen journalism can make important contributions to democracy if citizens are ready to act. What is needed is not a million citizen journalism web sites but a million citizen journalists: citizens who wish to be the subjects rather than the objects of history, who wish to write that history rather than to have it dictated to them, who would rather create than consume culture. Where these citizen take action, citizen journalism and democracy will flourish.