OhmyNews, the South Korean internet newspaper that's a world leader in the citizen-journalism scene, interviews Dan Gillmor, who's leaving his corporate newspaper gig behind to become a citizen journalism entrepreneur.

An excerpt:

I heard your remarks yesterday at the conference. It seems your anger against the mainstream media was a part of the reason you took this direction in journalism.

I don't want that to be the impression that people take away (from the conference). I still love newspapers and I work with wonderful people and have enormous respect for the institution of journalism that I've been part of for a long time.

But I do think that election coverage, in particular, was not our best hour. Mainstream journalism should have done a better job as we should have done with other things. But we still do a better job at important journalism in broadcasting and reporting that so far we don't see done by the online community.

In your opinion, what is the difference between OhmyNews and blogs in America?

There are so many differences. The top difference is that your publication takes responsibility for what it publishes. The closer to the top of the page an article gets, the more editing I know you do. And you are a publication that (citizen reporters) can be a part of.

But bloggers are individuals, scattered around the world and most have no editing at all. Blogging is a very individualistic medium. From the people I talked to when I visited Korea that were contributing to your publication, it was clear that part of the reason why they did it was to be part of OhmyNews. I think bloggers just want to be who they are rather than part of something else.

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So if the American bloggers make an alliance, they will become more powerful. But why don't they?

Some do.

Why don't the bloggers create their own version of OhmyNews?

There are alliances among bloggers, but they are informal and they are based more on linking than on any arrangement. People sort of start to agree on something or want to point to something. And that's actually quite powerful. When that happens in a major way, you see things change quickly.

As far as I know, there was no formal or even largely informal decision on the part of many people who started getting furious with CBS news for the (Bush national guard documents) story that they broadcast. But there were a lot of people who agreed with each other that this needed to be investigated and there was a lot that happened -- without a lot of phone calls.

It wasn't a top-down decision, it was a bottom-up decision, and that's very powerful. So I do think that there is a room for a business or collective of bloggers who say, "Well, we want to cover the world our way so come to our page where we are all allied together" -- I haven't seen that happen yet, but I don't know why it wouldn't.

There is some sense that the blogosphere in the U.S. is vastly liberal, as with Korea. Do you think that the Internet as a medium inherently favors certain political spectrums?

No. It's a tool. It favors the people who are literal -- who can express their opinions succinctly and powerfully. The most successful early bloggers were conservatives, not liberals, in America. Or libertarian, depending on how you want to define people. But the most successful blogs that emerged after 9/11 were more conservative -- what became known as the war blogs -- and while there are some very successful liberal Weblogs around, but I don't think that they are as large in number as the conservative. But there are conversations in both -- there's room for everyone.

Related stories from OhmyNews:

We The Media: Rise of Citizen Journalism