ed Newspapers in Korea cope with painful transition

By Lee Chang-sup

This Sunday will be the 57th Newspaper Day in Korea. However, Korean newspapers are in no celebratory mood owing to their declining readership and profit.

According to a survey by the Korea Press Foundation (KPF), in 2012, newspapers incurred a loss even though sales rose by 4.6 percent. The survey also shows a clear downturn in readership. While 82 percent of the respondents in the KPF’s 2002 survey said they read newspapers, only 40.9 percent said so in the survey for last year. The KPF predicts this decline will continue as readers switch further to free online news.

As serious as the falling income in the printed media is the ideological polarization. Korean newspapers are divided in the same way as the political landscape. This divisiveness in the media and political parties also divide the people.

Conservative dailies Chosun, JoongAng and DongA represent right-wing newspapers, which advocate anti-North Korean views and capture more than half of the newspaper market.

On the other hand, progressive dailies Hankyoreh and Kyunghyang represent left-wing newspapers, which advocate engagement with North Korea. In Korea, neutral dailies gain little attention.

Robert J. Koehler, who runs a blog on Korean issues, The Marmot’s Hole, said, “If you read the Chosun Ilbo and then read the Hankyoreh, you feel that you are living in two different countries.”

However, Koehler does not think this diversity is a weakness because newspapers in any part of the world have their own ideological leanings. “Korea’s media environment is diverse and vibrant, and most journalists are professional, with newspapers informative and entertaining,” he said. “It is hard to ask for more than that.”

Nevertheless, the ideology of newspapers has implications. For instance, as newspapers reflect the conservatives’ hard-line stance and the liberals’ advocacy of engagement with the North, they make it difficult for the government to chart a sustainable and consistent North Korea policy. In addition, newspapers are often used to gauge a reader’s own ideology. For example, during a job interview, many applicants are reluctant to say which daily they read, worrying that recruiters will infer their ideological leaning from it.

“They cannot read the progressive dailies publicly. What is this society where you cannot read whatever you want to read? In England, I can read The Guardian or The Times, and no one will judge me. In Korea, you pick up one or the other, and you are immediately judged,” said a British journalist who subscribes to Korean dailies and who declined to be named.

“Korea must stop judging people, placing them in one camp or another. It is the division in a society that also plagues progress in the unification of the Korean Peninsula,” he added.

Online media is growing faster than printed media. The KPF reported online media posted an increase of 23 percent in sales and 5 percent in profit last year.

An advantage of online media is its speed. Foreign readers, such as Korea University graduate student Raphael Rashid, marvel at the speed at which information is disseminated through online news. This efficiency is due to the mushrooming of online newspapers as well as the country’s technological advances.

However, online media are not without challenges. As the competition stiffens, online dailies end up sacrificing basic journalism rules such as avoiding sensationalism. They try to increase readership by posting articles on sex, scandals and gossip about celebrities and other famous people.

Further, in an attempt to be the first to upload a story, many online news outlets forego credible sources and proper attribution. Many articles contain few quotations, and when they do, their sources are either anonymous or non-credible ones like Wikipedia. If such articles were school assignments, they will surely be given an “F.”

People say customers are always right, but in this case, readers are part of the problem because they prefer sensational over analytical news. Recently, for example, news of a sex scandal implicating a former justice minister ranked higher on search engine Naver than news of North Korea’s nuclear threat.

This sensationalism extends to the coverage of world news. Local dailies seldom feature the world news on their front page except when the topic is sensational, like when a Korean citizen is kidnapped or attacked in a foreign country, when a Korean-born female golfer wins an LPGA title or when singer Psy performs overseas.

This limited world news coverage lead Koreans to believe that Korea is famous worldwide. In fact, many Koreans who travel overseas find foreigners sometimes fail to differentiate between South Korea and North Korea. Further, not all of them know that Samsung, Hyundai and LG are Korean companies.

Likewise, the Korean media is unnecessarily inflammatory when covering news on foreign people and companies. For an instance, law-breaking American servicemen gain an exaggerated coverage. Foreign banks, including Citibank and Standard Chartered in Korea, are often negatively portrayed.

Newspapers in Korea are facing difficulties as they transition into the IT era. Online media are not generating income fast enough to offset the decline in overall readership. While they cope during this painful transition, they end up foregoing journalism ethics, and consequently, news quality. In order to retain loyal customers and gain new ones, newspapers may be tempted to become even more ideological, sensational and commercial than before.

The struggles of the media also have implications for the nation. As the media approaches every issue with their own ideological and commercial angles, they make it difficult for policymakers to arrive at a consensus on national agenda.

Lee Chang-sup is the executive managing director of The Korea Times. Contact him at editorial@koreatimes.co.kr.