At the time, the internet was becoming a music scene of its own, incubating would-be outsider rappers like Soulja Boy and Wale, and pushing them from obscurity to the center. Oh dove into internet culture, aggregating viral dance YouTubes and writing about a new Juelz Santana track and the coffee her sister sent her from Portland in the same sentence. “Early on, I was live-streaming from my living room while watching Lost and eating bok choy. There would be 30 other people, and we’re all just sitting there, reacting,” she says. Other hip-hop bloggers of the day — like then-college student Andrew Nosnitsky, muckraker Byron Crawford, and Atlanta’s snarky Freshalina — wrote about rap in a personal, entertaining way, but no one on the web combined approachability with access in the way Oh did.

Hot 97 didn’t interfere with Oh’s web venture; the station barely even noticed. “At that time, there was such a disconnect between traditional and ‘new’ media that blogging was seen as an unnecessary but fun diversion," she says. "For a time, there was a policy against shouting out your MySpace handle on the air." But some of Oh’s scoops were better suited for the internet than for radio. “I reported a scoop on my Saturday afternoon Hot 97 show, about Jim Jones blasting his Dipset co-founder, Cam’ron. That was the first time anyone publicly acknowledged tension within the group. But our talk breaks on air were less than two minutes at the time, so I could only touch on it, and then say, ‘I’m posting more of the details on my blog.’”

Seven years after its launch, the site employs three round-the-clock writers, and with around 250,000 unique visitors in the past month, it’s more popular than MP3 feeds like Rap Radar and Nah Right. It still uses its original blog roll format, and has a header banner with a dead Myspace profile URL. (Oh says the site’s so outdated that it’s got an air of “normcore” cool, but that a redesign is coming soon.)

Missinfo.tv doesn’t compete with more robust music and culture sites like Complex or Pitchfork, but it’s a well-trusted news source for those hubs, who regularly borrow videos her team captures or news they aggregate faster than anyone else. And true to its roots too, Missinfo.tv is bigger than hip-hop, covering EDM and R&B, sports news, and tech rumors. “There's a lot of people who'll full-on spazz out on an indie-rock song or a Waka Flocka song,” Oh says. “I'm just happy that this day in age, we have lots of people that will understand us.”

For this lucrative market — the twentysomethings who read her blog, go on rave cruises, and can find something poetic about both Nas and Chief Keef — Oh is in a unique position to become a figurehead. Recently, she’s been tapped by VitaminWater, Uniqlo, Red Bull, and Hennessy to host genre-blending events and pose for campaigns. This year, she brought on TMWRK, the management team that handles Diplo, to help her expand her profile.

The new opportunities can feel daunting. “It’s all about fighting that voice inside who says, ‘What the fuck do you have to talk about? No one wants to hear you.' You’ve got to itemize the reasons why your inner Debbie Downer is full of shit, and know when you should ignore them, and when they might have a valid point.”

After all, even for Jay Z, it’s tough to get old in hip-hop — and for women in the industry, it seems especially fraught. The people who championed the genre in its first generation now struggle to define what rap is, or how they should participate in it at middle age. So it’s remarkable that Oh has remained at the center of that conversation as long as she has, and outlasted lots of the names that once appeared alongside hers on print mastheads. (There are a handful of others who’ve managed this kind of longevity — former Vibe writer Eliott Wilson founded the rap news site Rapradar.com and hosts a popular live interview series; Sway still hosts on satellite radio and MTV.)

“The fact that her relevance has only increased as time has passed really makes her an aberration and quite a big deal,” says Noah Callahan-Bever, a longtime friend of Oh’s who’s now the editor-in-chief of Complex. “Writers who were killing it in '93 and '94, those guys pop up at parties, and I'm sure that they've moved on to other interesting pursuits, but they are no longer voices within hip-hop culture that matter to 16-, 17-, 18-year-olds.” For the young journalists who walk through Complex’s doors, Callahan-Bever says, “Minya is absolutely a point of aspiration.”

Maybe that’s because she acts more like a young writer than a vet. (Oh declined to disclose her age for this article, though a back count suggests she’s 40, give or take a year or two.) “Everybody's older than they say," she says. "But women, if you're young, you kind of have to downplay it, 'cause you feel like people aren't gonna take you serious. If you're older, you have to downplay it cause people start wondering why you aren't locked down. I'm 85 years old in many ways and 14 in others.”

When Oh got her start in media, hip-hop fans largely considered themselves a united front, standing up for a shared set of values. But a generation later, the people who identify as rap fans are a fractured bunch, without common tastes. Peter Rosenberg, for example, promotes local acts with mixtapes and makes silly internet videos, but accurately or not, he’s best known as a shit-slinging purist. In summer 2012 on a side stage of Summer Jam, the station’s annual marquee concert, he insulted Nicki Minaj’s pop-leaning single “Starships," prompting her to hastily cancel her headlining performance. The two made up on air a year later, but Rosenberg stands by his positions that rap benefits from clear-cut bounds. “Nicki was supposed to be one of ours,” he told the New Yorker in April. “I didn’t want young kids looking at this dance-pop song, going, ‘This is what rappers do.’”

By contrast, Oh is less interested in defining what rappers should do than she is in forecasting what they might do next, and why. Her hip-hop world has room for rappers who are in bands, rappers who wish they were born in the ‘90s, and rappers who design capes — each of them fair game for loving, sarcastic critique. “She’s kind, and that’s different from nice,” says Mary H.K. Choi, a producer of the TV newsmagazine Take Part Live, who previously worked as an editor at Missbehave, XXL, and Complex. "But the loyalty she inspires is crazy. So many different people trust her with high-level, FBI rap-files shit."

For Choi, Oh is a model of success not only because she’s earned so many people’s confidence, but because she’s been able to do so without compromising her happiness. “Her existing made me feel better about my decisions,” Choi says. “I moved to New York at 22 and took this back-breaking job. And then met someone who was Korean but also super cool with all the credibility. And she didn’t throw me any of that ‘Oh, here you are, this other Korean lady’ shade. And not only was she really hot and all the guys sweated her, but [they did] from afar, because they respected her. There’s just that unique quality that successful people in New York have where they can stay hungry. Not greedy, but really intellectually curious. The work didn’t destroy her. She didn’t shortchange every other aspect of her life.”