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We Media: Is citizen journalism an Asian phenomenon?

Posted: 05/05/06 By: Mike Butcher

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Will so-called 'citizen journalism' turn out to be a global phenomenon or will it only flourish in certain countries?

This issue was raised at the We Media Conference in London which honed in on Asia, where citizen media is flourishing, sometimes under restrictive regimes.

But although the public perception of bloggers in China, for instance, are of lone voices under the jack-boot of a totalitarian regime, it seemed the dominant consumption of online media there is for entertainment, not politics.

Speaking on a panel, David Schlesinger, global managing editor of Reuters, said many prefer to talk online about movies and their sex lives, instead of politics. Political bloggers remained confined to the ranks of individuals, and have so far not formed any kind of discernible political movement.

Marcus Xiang of blogging service PDX.cn said housewives like to 'moblog' their kids' progress, and the mobile is generally a favoured medium, especially for workers in remote regions of China. There are more than 400 million mobiles in China, dwarfing the number of internet-connected PCs. Although he does blog about politics, it is his posts on his personal experiences that get the most attention from visitors.

In fact, in the The Media Center chat room, run during the conference, a Chinese contributor criticised the Western media for focusing on internet censorship in that country, when in fact, he said, many Chinese find it easy to get around the censorship online. And one of the contributors on a satellite link-up from Hong Kong insisted that, aside from a few specific areas, the internet has been by and large free under Chinese rule.

OhMyNews in South Korea is a highly successful 'citizen journalism' site with 33,000 citizen reporters, alongside professional editors, but Rebecca MacKinnon of Global Voices pointed out that the success of OhMyNews could be put down to South Korea not having a long-established free press. The fact that more than 86 per cent of South Korean households are online also helps.

The relatively new democracy was previously controlled by a political elite, which is why new web sites have arisen that have not needed older, legacy media to attract attention. This differs from countries like the UK, where there is a long tradition of established independent journalism.

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