http://english.ohmynews.com/articleview/article_view.asp?article_class=19&no=366939&rel_no=1

Citizen Journalism and Social Responsibility
Report from the ICA 57th Annual Conference
Jay Hauben (jhauben)     	

As a reporter for Ohmynews International (OMNI), I was interested in 
attending the 57th Annual Conference of the International Communications 
Association (ICA). (1) I was granted a press pass to report back to the 
readers of OMNI. But also I wanted to attend in order to better understand 
journalism, especially citizen journalism.

The conference was held May 24-28, 2007 in San Francisco. Its theme was 
"Creating Communication: Content, Control, and Critique." The first 
speaker reported that more than 2,200 of the 34,000 members of ICA were 
there. There were more than 400 sessions. The panels were grouped under 21 
subfields such as Political Communications, Public Relations, Feminist 
Scholarship, Journalism Studies, Mass Communication, Health 
Communications, etc. There were also four keynote panels and four 
grassroots panels.

Such a large conference presented me with great difficulty choosing which 
sessions to attend. I looked to see where the South Korean online 
newspaper OhmyNews (OMN) was the topic of a presentation. I was interested 
in whether the scholars sought to be socially responsible and what was 
presented as to the responsibility of journalists. I looked to see how new 
developments were described and investigated. This report can only touch 
on some of what were the highlights for me.

One of the speakers at the opening plenary session set a social goal for 
the assembled graduate students and scholars. She suggested the purpose of 
research was to "talk truth to power with data." She saw herself as a 
committed global citizen, not so much concerned with publication 
worthiness but rather with how research improves the lives of people. She 
reminded the audience that in many places reporters are often killed for 
being good investigative journalists. Later in the conference the criteria 
of social responsibility of researchers was occasionally repeated by panel 
chairpersons when they summed up their panels.

The second plenary panel focused on social networking and web 2.0. The 
first speaker reviewed the history of online social networking dating back 
to the Plato system at the Urbana Campus of the University of Illinois(*) 
in 1960 and the work of J.C.R. Licklider in the 1960s. He called attention 
to the 1968 article by Licklider and Robert Taylor, "The Computer as a 
Communication Device" 
(http://gatekeeper.dec.com/pub/DEC/SRC/research-reports/abstracts/src-rr-061.html) 
and said it was necessary reading for anyone seriously interested in 
understanding the current developments. He pointed to substantial 
predecessors like Usenet, FIDOnet and Bulletin Board Systems (BBS), all of 
which should be influencing any study of what is now called Web 2.0. He 
felt it is not that something new is emerging, but rather based on the 
best of the past we should be seeking norms and standards for the 
continually developing net.

The next speaker opened her presentation by pointing to OMN in South 
Korea, with a reported 50,000 registered citizen journalists collaborating 
to report on the news missed by the mainstream media (MSM). In her view 
OMN was a social network.

The speaker reported that her research team is using OMN as the model for 
a project to help the U.S. Patent Office more rapidly process its backlog 
of over 400,000 patent applications waiting for review. She is hopeful 
that the success OMN has achieved via citizen reporting also can be 
achieved by a community of self-selected citizens collaborating to do 
patent review. She saw her project as a prototype for a future where there 
will be online citizens collaborating to make society's laws (citizen 
legislators) and citizens collaborating to develop policy alternatives 
(citizen policy advisors). She saw OMN and not blogs or wikis as promising 
citizens a role in the highly structured social processes needed to solve 
society's problems.

The last speaker on the second plenary panel analyzed that Web 2.0 was an 
effort to develop the wonders of the Internet for commercial purposes. For 
her, the web is still the web. Talk of web 2.0 and of "harnessing" as does 
Tim O'Reilly (2) is, she said, a code for finding a business model for 
using the collective intelligence and social networking to produce profit. 
Social networking is reciprocal, based on cooperation and equality. 
Harnessing is the opposite; it is a unilateral capture of one side by the 
other. While she saw Web 2.0 as an attempt to blur the boundary between 
public goods and private property, she was optimistic that the crowd was 
pushing back against the harnessing. The companies will have to change, 
she concluded. "The crowd will upend all understandings."

A theme that threaded through a number of the Journalism Studies sessions 
was the challenge or puzzle that online participatory journalism, 
especially citizen journalism, poses. Especially with newspaper readership 
dropping and younger generations relying on online sources, professional 
journalists and established news organizations are challenged to come to 
grips with and join the new phenomena. Researchers found a spectrum of 
reactions, ranging from "online journalism is not journalism but only 
voyeurism," to "there is no limit to what online journalism will become as 
it replaces off-line journalism."

One researcher reported that in one newsroom the journalists rotate who 
answers the email. He found all the journalists felt that was a 
punishment. They wanted to be reporting the news, not getting the feedback 
from their reporting. Some researchers pointed out that how the public 
views citizen journalism will likely be framed by how professional 
journalists portray it. With their profession at stake, that portrayal may 
frame citizen journalism in a negative way. Also, there appeared little 
understanding among the researchers or the journalists they studied that 
citizen journalism at its best is a combination of citizens as journalists 
and journalists as citizens.

Another misunderstanding refuted by the practice of the Korean language 
OMN and other online media was mentioned in a number of presentations. 
Online media are not necessarily alternative media. For example, it was 
reported that OMN was judged to be the 6th most influential news source in 
South Korea.

In another session, a researcher reported on the Esouth Newsletter, a 
mailing list in Taiwan with over100,000 email subscribers. Esouth has 
sustained itself since 1995 as a public platform for the heterogeneous 
voices of social movement activists. Esouth is distributed in cooperation 
with the commercial website URL@ENEWS. The total number of subscribers to 
all 262 mailing lists distributed by URL@ENEWS is over 4 million. There 
are over half a million subscribers to the URL Digest, a single mailing of 
articles from various newsletters. The size of that readership is 
comparable to that of the MSM in Taiwan. On some issues such as the 
dispute over the development of a new national park on aboriginal land, 
Esouth presented the opposing positions of aboriginal activists and 
environmental activists, gaining the attention of and comments from a 
large number of readers. To the researcher this was evidence that the 
distinction between MSM and this alternative media is blurring.

In another session, a researcher reported on his use of the experience of 
Ohmynews to test whether a public sphere 
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_sphere) in the Habermasian sense 
might be emerging via online networking activity. The researcher's 
criteria for a public sphere were similar to the questions: Is there 
rational critical discourse based on argument, not assertion, over 
important social questions? Does that debate influence the social and 
political agenda? After describing his theoretical basis, the researcher 
reported the results of his case study of the coverage of the death from 
stomach cancer of a conscript just after discharge from his mandatory 
South Korean military service.

A report from a citizen journalist appeared in OMN on Oct. 24, 2005 
concerning the diagnosis in a private hospital of late stage terminal 
cancer of a 28-year-old recently discharged conscript. The victim was Roh 
Chung-guk. While still serving, Roh was examined by a military doctor who 
diagnosed Roh's stomach trouble as due to an ulcer. Ohmynews sent out two 
staff reporters to write follow-up stories. Roh soon died. Within 10 days 
of the first article, 27 more articles about this case appeared in OMN. 
The readers contributed 771 responses on the discussion board. OMN readers 
started to send money to help out Roh's family. OMN received information 
about 20 additional victims of inadequate medical treatment while serving 
in the South Korean military. Mothers wrote to convey their worry for 
their sons in service. The early denials of responsibility by the Korean 
military and government were criticized and exposed as unfounded.

Discussion of the death of Roh quickly spread throughout South Korea. The 
government was forced to investigate the case and announced plans to 
improve health and human rights in the military.

The researcher's conclusion based on a discourse analysis (3) of the 
articles and comments in OMN was that the discussion was rational and 
critical, and effective in moving the government to take corrective 
action. In terms of his Habermasian criteria, he concluded that OMN is an 
emerging online public sphere in South Korea, if only to some extent and 
only just emerging.

In the first grassroots participatory panel, one presenter sought for the 
essential principles that have guided OMN. She called attention to the 
vision of OMN founder Oh Yeon-ho. Based on his experience as a journalist 
for 10 years for a monthly magazine outside the media mainstream, Oh saw 
that the challenge was to break the conservative hold on news-making and 
agenda-setting in South Korea. He set OMN the large goal of increasing the 
role of progressive news media to a 50/50 par with the conservative news 
media.

Oh had limited resources, which he realized he needed to concentrate on 
carefully chosen stories. Also, he realized OMN could increase its 
resources by encouraging passionate citizens to be OMN reporters. OMN thus 
had strong progressive content and a broader content than its limited 
resources would have made possible. In answer to a question asked after 
her presentation, the presenter explained that citizen reporters get 
editorial help and a small payment for their articles. The presenter was 
from the U.S. She felt a need for a U.S. model of OMN to take up the 
dominance of the conservative news media in her society. (4)

The variety of disciplines and topics at this conference was too broad for 
this report to capture, but I will mention two other presentations as a 
clue to what the field covers.

One presentation examined the apology that the New York Times editors gave 
in May 2004 for their newspaper's pre-Iraq war intelligence reporting. The 
Times had helped set the news agenda about the reasons for war by 
featuring several front-page stories about weapons of mass destruction 
(WMD). The Times reporters, especially Judith Miller, had suppressed 
evidence of doubt within the intelligence community and relied instead on 
anonymous sourcing from Iraqi exiles and Bush administration insiders. The 
premiere U.S. mainstream newspaper had helped set a deceptive agenda.

The presenter showed that the editor's apology blamed the faulty sources 
and left the U.S. government manipulation of the news unmentioned. In 
essence, the apology continued the lack of criticism of the U.S. 
government that the WMD articles a year earlier had begun. But the apology 
did criticize that the Times had emphasized "breaking news" and had 
marginalized follow-up stories that went against administration or exile 
claims. The presenter's analysis pointed to the responsibility of 
journalists to verify the truth of what they are reporting especially if 
they claim anonymous sources. Journalists, he concluded, must serve their 
societal role with skepticism and a willingness to be adversarial. How 
else can a democratic populace hold its leaders accountable?

Two researchers from Spain reported on a form of school education based on 
dialog and community involvement in the classroom. Their theoretical basis 
was a long history of analysis that communication and learning are social 
processes enhanced by collective development of interpretations of texts 
and of the world. Their research studied the effect of inviting community 
members and the public to spend time in the class rooms where students and 
community members worked in groups and learning to read was a group, not 
an individual project. They reported that a level of equality among 
learners was achieved and the academic success of students who left these 
classes for the next level of education was greatly improved over the past 
performance of students from these communities. This success had generated 
requests from other communities to similarly restructure their classrooms 
into collective learning centers.

Judging from this conference, communication seemed to be a very broad 
super field of studies, perhaps too broad. The quality of the 
presentations ranged from profound to mundane. Strange, also, with all the 
new means of communication, the conference was not broadcast, webcast or 
communicated to the world.

So large and varied a conference is hard to navigate. Yet it was clear 
something is emerging in the field of communication. The fairly frequent 
reference to OMN as worthy of study or worthy of a scholar's attention 
suggested that OMN might be an arrow to the future of journalism. Also, 
the Internet, a relatively young communication phenomenon, is having its 
effect on all aspects of society. Scholarly studies can help expose the 
problems of society and can help understand from where the solutions may 
come. Pointing to models like OMN and paying attention to the new online 
developments showed that among these scholars some were finding a way to 
meet the social responsibility referred to in the opening plenary panel.
(*) This article has been amended.

1. The papers from this conference are only available to attendees. Since 
the papers are not public I have not given people's names in this report. 
One presenter requested that I not identify presenters because some of the 
papers are only drafts. http://www.icahdq.org/
2. See for example "What is Web 2.0," page 2. 
http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/oreilly/tim/news/2005/09/30/what-is-web-20.html?page=2
3. Discourse analysis seeks the social significance of the texts used in a 
discourse not just the meaning of the sentences.
4. This presentation was subsequently published online. 
http://english.ohmynews.com/articleview/article_view.asp?no=363832&rel_no=1