by Hye Gi Shim

 “To be a journalist is to bear witness,” wrote Roger Cohen of The New York Times, “The rest is no more than ornamentation.” Today, bearing witness is made easier than ever thanks to the revolution in information and communication technology. The power to find, produce, and distribute information has expanded through the Internet and via digital cameras and cell phones leading to a growth of citizen journalists — people without professional training in journalism who produce, augment, or fact-check the news.

Asia is home to some of the most wired countries in the world (South Korea, Japan, Taiwan) as well as to some of the most restricted ones (North Korea, Burma, Cambodia). The rising tide of the Internet, however, is lifting all boats. Citizen journalists are sharing opinions about corruption and food safety in Cambodia and China and are influencing presidential elections in South Korea and India, and influencing the outcome of major events.

·         During the 2002 presidential election in South Korea, OhMyNews, the world’s first online newspaper that accepts articles from freelance contributors, played an influential role in the election of the progressive Roh Moo-hyun after it mobilized hundreds of thousands of reform-minded voters on the Internet.

·         Tourists and residents in Southeast Asia provided firsthand accounts of the devastations caused by the Indian Ocean Tsunami in 2004 through personal blogs, emails, and cell phones, helping the mainstream media outlets grasp the extent of the disaster during its initial stages.

·         The Internet became the platform for information sharing and nationwide mourning immediately after the earthquake in China’s Sichuan Province in May 2009. The news traveled through Twitter and similar Chinese-language microblogging services faster than through any major news agencies. Compelled by these responses, the government-controlled media reported on the earthquake with unprecedented speed and accountability.

·         Visitors and citizens of Mumbai used Twitter, cell phones, and other online social networks to share the news of the terrorist attacks with the outside world in November 2008. These activities helped the spread of information during the earlier stages while government and mainstream media outlets were struggling to grasp the extent of the crisis.

The implications for citizen journalism extend beyond simple reporting of facts. In Asia, where only 6 percent of the population has access to free media and 51 percent live in restricted media environments, technological advances provide the ways in which citizens can sidestep restrictions and become a public interest watchdog, though often with repercussions.

·         In Burma, one of the worst-rated countries in the world in terms of press freedom, the junta holds a firm grip on all print media. Access to web sites presenting critical views of the government is blocked, and all telecommunications equipment must be registered in order to trace and punish anyone posting unfavorable information or opinions. During the 2007 anti-government protests, however, visual and written reports of the uprising and the governmental crackdown flooded the Internet through blogs.  Cell phone images and text messages also provided information to international audiences.

·         China continues to produce the news in a strictly top-down manner. One of the handful examples of bottom-up citizen journalism is the story of Zhou Shuguang, a vegetable vendor who wrote about “nail houses” (homes that belong to people who refuse evictions for development) in Chongqing on his blog, His adventures, which drew millions of readers and pushed the issue to the mainstream media, ended when the authorities detained him for two days and shut down his blog.

Citizen journalism is raising new issues. Some note with concern the decline of conventionality in presentation, which can impede the readers’ understanding of what is being written. Others, like Dan Gillmor, the author of We the Media, point to the issues of fairness. In what Gillmor calls “advocacy journalism,” in which advocacy organizations report on issues that have not been picked up by major news outlets, there is a tendency to close the eyes to disagreements and nuances.

With the rise of citizen journalism, however, the concept of objectivity, a crucial value in traditional media in which governments and powerful corporations monopolized news production, is under challenge. The focus may now shift toward the accuracy and transparency of reporting, as citizens seek to utilize their access to technology in order to supplement, possibly even replace, traditional news sources.