SUMMIT

The first major breakthrough happened in Asia. In 2000, South Korean invesgave
journalist Oh Yeon-ho started OhmyNews.com with the moo “Every Cizen is a
Reporter.” That website is largely credited with changing South Korea’s conservave
polical landscape. At OhmyNews, about 50 professional reporters and editors screen and
edit news arcles wrien by more than 400,000 amateurs – from elementary students to
professors. These volunteers submit between 150 and 200 arcles a day, which make up
more than two-thirds of OhmyNews’s content.
Then cizen journalism invaded television. In August 2005, Al Gore launched a new cable
news network, Current, to empower the younger generaon of news viewers – those who
grew up with user-generated content, YouTube, blogs.
In the Philippines, ABS-CBN pioneered Cizen Patrol in 2004 – using the power of prime-
me news (as mainstream as you get) to empower ordinary people to demand their
problems are heard and addressed. These are reports done by cizens with immediate
problems. Our daily rangs showed Cizen Patrol was highly popular.
Taking the lessons we learned from that, we went one step further in 2007 – to put the
idea of cizen journalism together with the vast reach and power of ABS-CBN and the
ubiquitous cellphone. You know for many years the Philippines was called the text capital
of the world: our people sent nearly 2 million sms or text messages daily.
In this campaign we called Boto Mo, Ipatrol Mo – which roughly translates to Patrol Your
Vote, we took the tradional power of broadcast media, cable, and combined it with new
media the Internet and mobile phone technology to create the first instance globally
where a news media organisaon called on cizen journalists to rise for a very acve,
polical purpose – to patrol their votes and push for clean elecons.
We moved one step ahead of western media organisaons because of our unique polical
situaon: a country of 88 million people in a democracy which sll used manual vong and
counng … where charges of fraud, cheang and violence in elecons are constant and
consistent. No candidate ever admits losing in Philippine elecons. They just say they were
cheated! And as far as violence – well, last year, the Philippine Police said it was one of our
most peaceful elecons ever – with nearly 130 people killed in 217 poll-related violence!
The idea for Boto Mo, Ipatrol Mo was simple: get the people to care and to take acon. If
you see something wrong or something good, tell us about it. If you see someone trying
to buy the votes, snap a picture on your cellphone and send it to us. If you see a town
mayor using public vehicles for his campaign, shoot a video with your cellphone and send
it to us. If you see violence, tell us about it, and aer a verificaon process, we will put it
to air. Two months into the four-month campaign, we received reports from the provinces
that Boto Mo, Ipatrol Mo helped level the playing field where incumbents were running
aer we ran a story with the cellphone picture of city resources used for campaigns. So
cellphones early on had become effecve weapons!
It is an ulmate message of empowerment: we wanted to send the message that vigilance
was important, that you should not become part of the problem but provide the soluon
– and that if you want a beer future, you are not alone. We wanted to counter the
growing apathy we were seeing, and show why these midterm elecons were important
to our future.
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