By Michael Breen

If you know reporters you will know they combine a natural curiosity with a critical faculty that assesses and files what their curiosity turns up. This, plus the ability to present their information well, is what keeps them employed.

Many have been rushing around this month to find more about Kim Jong-un, the mysterious young man who South Korea's intelligence agency thinks is the next leader of North Korea.

In their zeal, several have produced scoops. One was wrong, like a photo of Kim that turned out to be of a surprised South Korean. Another, a story that Kim had met the Chinese president, was almost certainly rumor presented as fact. But we've had a credible photo of Kim at school in Switzerland and an impromptu TV interview with half-brother Kim Jong-nam, and a ripping yarn about an attempted assassination.

The noteworthy common thread is that all were scoops by Japanese journalists, who are beating the Korean press on what we'd like to think of as a Korean story. Why is this?

As Korean reporters will admit to you, the media system here is not competitive in a way that best serves the reader. There are too many newspapers running the same stories and expressing the same views. There is no copyright on news, so all Korean papers can run stories that appear elsewhere without really expanding on the information.

Not that there isn't competition. Reporters can be intensely competitive with fellow reporters from their own newspapers, but tend to behave like colleagues with reporters from different newspapers who cover the same beat. This varies from beat to beat, but in some cases reporters actually feel uncomfortable with scoops.

Thus, they lack motivation to exercise their curiosity.

Other factors come into play. With promotion, for example, seniority comes before merit. If a reporter went to Switzerland, got Kim's school yearbook, and traced some classmates to interview, he would not necessarily get on the fast track.

News reporters are also insufficiently separated from the business of their newspaper. I know a reporter from a top newspaper who got promoted after binning an exclusive in-depth interview with a foreign CEO on a controversial issue. Instead, he went to the company's Korean competitor and secured a multi-billion won advertising commitment for not telling the foreign company's story.

Another feature of reportage here is that news tends to flow from government and chaebol downhill to we, the unwashed masses, and not from the ground up. If, for example, there were an outbreak of swine fever, the news would most likely come from our reporters based at the appropriate government ministry, who had been given a press release, rather than from an enterprising reporter who had noticed pigs sneezing.

Reporters are an elite in Korea. They are satisfied to know more than they put in print. This week I was talking with a senior reporter from a major daily about the holes in the official account about the death last month of former President Roh. Why did the bodyguard throw Roh on his back instead of wait for an ambulance? What condition was Roh in when they arrived at the hospital?

``He was dead when the bodyguard found him,'' my friend said. Investigators believe Roh was afraid to jump and had pulled his jacket over his head so as not to see what he was about to do. As he fell he hit the rock wall twice and the jacket flew off. It was found some distance away. Roh was found dead.

Did the paper report this? No, the reporter was curious like the rest of us and asked contacts close to the investigation. He satisfied himself but did not feel compelled to write it up. As far as I know, this version of events, that would put some conspiracy theories to rest, has still not been published.

As this example suggests, most stories disappear quickly. But North Korea, we can be sure, will be front page for a long time to come, which means there are plenty more scoops about Kim Jong-un out there for the taking.

Michael Breen is chairman of Insight Communications Consultants and exclusive partner of FD International. He can be reached at mike.breen@insightcomms.com.