BigShinyThing

The Financial Times covered this story back in November last year but Tyler Brule has now picked up on it for his rather tame media show The Desk (BBC 4 Wednesdays). Koreans vote for their favourite stories and the top ones win monetary prizes. In a country where the conventional and state media is tightly controlled, one ohmynews ‘citizen reporter’ (as the site calls them) has recently won the equivalent of $20k (the annual wage in Korea) for a story criticising the government.

For non Korean speakers the international site is here. It also proves founder Oh Yeon Ho’s global ambitions… he has also been busy evangelising about model of ohmynews and citizen reporting .

The UK print media is increasingly drawing on gossip sites such as Popbitch and Gawker to feed its stories, a CNN journalist has been brought down by bloggers and the BBC successfully conned by The Yes Men. And this is only in recent months. Is bottom-up media such as ohmynews.com where we will get our most trusted information from in the future? And as Oh Yeon Ho predicts, is this the end of 20th century style journalism?