By Cho Jin-seo
Staff Reporter
The Internet blog has become an influential tool of online journalism in 2007, with the help of Web portal sites that use individuals as unpaid reporters.
Media Daum, the nation's largest Internet news service, named 14 users as the winners of the 2007 Blogger Reporting Awards, a rough equivalent of the Pulitzer Prize for online amateur journalism.
The first prize went to Choi Byung-sung, who made a series of reports about toxins contained in recycled cement, which is widely used in construction sites all over the country. The second prize was shared by three bloggers. One of them nicknamed Monggu, made an impact internationally by reporting on a demonstration by residents of Icheon City who ripped apart a live piglet in a protest against the Ministry of Defense in May.
Daum said that its ``blogger news'' service now has some 47,000 registered citizen reporters, who produce more than 2,500 stories every day without being paid.
``Blogger-reporters have heated up the Internet this year by unearthing hidden issues and leading public opinions,'' the company said in a release.
South Korea has led the online news reporting field for years. One of the best-known leaders of the field is OhMyNews, an online newspaper founded in 2000 with the motto ``Every Citizen Is a Reporter.''
The blogger-reporters are different from the OhMyNews reporters that they are not subject to any editorial format and are not paid for the service. In case of Choi, the first prize winner, he intends on spending several days in Yeongweol, Gangwon Province, to report on cement factories there and to interview people living nearby. His reports became an immediate hit on the Internet, and stimulated many offline newspapers and environmental organizations to make follow-ups. Surprised by the reaction, a few cement factories and governmental organizations, including Seoul Metropolitan Government, invited Choi to presentations and promised to more carefully prevent possible damages of producing and using recycled cement.
The second-prize winner Monggu posted a blog after witnessing protestors killing a live two-month-old piglet in front of the Ministry of Defense building in central Seoul.
The first-prize and second-prize winners received 3 million won and 1 million won each, respectively.