ALJ301 reactions, thoughts and musings

STOMP and OhmyNews aren’t the only leaders in the forward-thinking “now media” market.

The Philippines’ inquirer.net, led by editor-in-chief JV Rufino, has a strong multimedia mindset. Journos are given mobile phones and digital cameras and can file news from on the run, beating Manila’s traffic jams.

The Brisbane Times is the only totally online newsroom in Australia and it beat competitors’ website traffic within four months of launching.

Food for thought.

This week I discovered the Straits Times online mobile and print (STOMP) site. In some ways this site, which complements the more serious and staid Straits Times, mirrors the OhmyNews phenomenon (see my Week 5 post for more on OhmyNews).

But STOMP cleverly merges user-generated content with traditional journalism in a different way. It allows ordinary citizens to send in photos, news tips, even whole stories (in almost any format you can imagine), which are then re-worked by qualified journalists/producers.

The STOMP crew even allow the tipster to review the story and make changes if necessary. This idea freaked the hell out of me – in many cases where I’ve allowed someone to “check” my story they have taken it as an opportunity to nit-pick the crap out of it, resulting in tons of emails and phone calls back and forth.

Yet STOMP editor Jennifer Lewis says the initial petty complaints have slowed and the option creates a new kind of power in reporting. I guess it would be nice to know one could achieve 100 per cent accuracy with a little help from citizen journos.

But the truly great things about STOMP is its unassuming attitude about what constitutes news. The ‘about us‘ page puts it simply: 

“We want STOMP to become a forum of lively discussion – whether the topics are weighty national issues or where to get the best bak chor mee.”

Now there’s a way to appeal to all.

UPDATE (SEPTEMBER 26): For a more scathing (and rather funny) look at STOMP, check out this post by ALJ301 student Michael.

This week’s piece (PDF – head to chapter six) described the South Korean OhmyNews phenomenon.

Creator Oh Yeon-ho goes by the motto “every citizen is a reporter“. But, unlike blogs, contributors must conform to a strict code of ethics. I reckon this is a smarter way of tapping into the blogging world, a way of overcoming the Wikipedia-type problem of not being credible while still building that all-important sense of community.

Even more ingeniously, writers are paid according to the story’s popularity. So unlike many other news forums (apart from their few token attempts), it’s the readers who decide what the top news story is, not editors.

The format is clearly working: the site has been profitable since 2003 and makes 70 per cent of its revenue from advertising. It seems to me the concept worked because it moved a step ahead of other mediums stuck doing things the old way.

So what’s to stop the journalism world from heading this way in the future, especially if the advertising model is working?

In launching wholly online, OhmyNews also saved a heck of a lot of money. Makes me wonder if Fairfax Media had something similar in mind when it launched the Brisbane Times last year…

– Koren