We the Media

Chapter 6. Professional Journalists Join the Conversation

In October 1999, the Jane’s Intelligence Review, a journal widely followed in national security circles, wondered whether it was on the right track with an article about computer security and cyber-terrorism. The editors went straight to some experts—the denizens of Slashdot—and published a draft. In hundreds of postings on the site’s message system, the technically adept members of that community promptly tore apart the draft and gave, often in colorful language, a variety of perspectives and suggestions. Jane’s went back to the drawing board and rewrote the entire article from scratch. The community had created something, and Jane’s gratefully noted the contribution in the article it ultimately published. [142]

I started my weblog the same month. It was an experiment, one of the first blogs by a mainstream journalist. But it proved to be the linchpin in my understanding that my colleagues and I—and my profession as a whole—were entering a new stage of development. My readers, I realized, had become my collaborators.

Four months later, Oh Yeon Ho and a small team launched OhmyNews.com, a Korean online newspaper. From the beginning, they assumed that their readers weren’t just passive vessels for other people’s work. “Every citizen’s a reporter,” Oh wrote on February 22, 2000, as he announced the new site. “Journalists aren’t some exotic species, they’re everyone who seeks to take new developments, put them into writing, and ...