By Jacco Zwetsloot
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The content certainly had some commonalities with an airline monthly ― upbeat, colorful, informative, sometimes quirky, always inoffensive. Like our website, there were feature articles on festivals and parts of Korea that people should see, or aspects of Korean culture that foreigners must experience, etc.
I don't know whether we in the KOCIS office had any editorial input; probably somebody above me met the editors regularly to discuss story ideas, but I was surprised that the content writers for Korea.net generally did not seem to take part in any of that.
Because of my wide circle of friends in the expat community, I was asked to find a willing foreigner each month to write a one-page essay about life in Korea for the inside back page of the magazine. That task was not always easy. One of my oldest friends who particularly enjoys mountaineering wrote a piece lamenting the degradation of nature in Korea's national parks. Unsurprisingly, it was not published. Wrong tone.
On a given day each month, the entire draft copy of the magazine, properly laid out, would be transmitted to our office, where someone would print it out on A3 paper, and I had a couple of hours to go through and copy-edit the whole thing. I would sequester myself at my desk or sometimes in a quiet room, forsaking all other work, and set to this sheaf with a red pen.
Afterwards, I would hand it back to my boss with corrections, comments, and questions throughout. These were then sent (by courier?) back across town to the writing team for incorporation into the final copy. Eventually, I seem to recall that my suggestion of allowing me to do the correction by marking up a PDF file, rather than with a pen on paper, was accepted and we switched to that. Or that may be an illusory recollection of my desire to use more modern work methods.
Similarly, KOCIS outsourced the writing and layout of occasional books about Korea in various languages. These books were for distribution overseas. Periodically, young Korean backpackers or people from KOICA would come to our office to pick up some copies to take to wherever they were going, to educate the locals about Korea. I would be asked to copy-edit these tomes too. A major concern with some of these books was to make sure they kept up to date with Korea's latest achievements ― hosting the G20, or Kim Yuna's performances on the ice rink, for example.
Once in a while, a promotional video would be made, which might be aired on television or our website, and we at KOCIS had a chance to look at the end result and make comments on it. Usually I and another foreigner from the section that edited translations of presidential speeches were on that small committee. Surprisingly, it was only in post-production, when the ideas, script-writing, filming and editing had already been done, that we were asked to give feedback ― when the budget had been spent it was too late to go back to the drawing board and start again.
Even though the intent was usually worthy, and maybe the core concept was good, the execution was sometimes lacking. Either the wrong tone was struck, or the script was clunky, leading to a cringeworthy result.
A humorous example is the campaign "The more you know, the more you want to know," filled with stereotypes of foreign nationals asking questions about Korea that could easily be checked on Google. It can still be found on YouTube. This gem came out after my time at Korea.net, but is typical of the kind of videos that were made when I was there, too.
At these evaluation meetings, I suggested that somebody with a non-Korean background (or at least a Korean with significant experience overseas) be involved in the project from start to finish. The idea seemed to be accepted without demurral, but the following video project would have a similar result.
I am happy to say that things have improved in the eight years since I left. Whether there is a causal link between those two facts is anyone's guess. Or maybe my former colleagues are at last working with a global PR agency, something I wished were the case during my stint there.
Lastly, a bus anecdote. Our office was near the Blue House, and bus 8000 from Gwanghwamun Station went all the way around Gyeongbukgung, past our building and also the Presidential complex. Sometimes I caught this bus, and after the anti-beef candlelight protests of 2008 I noticed that there was always a man sitting at the front of the bus right by the entrance. He never seemed to get off but he always kept an eye on other passengers.
One day he came back to where I sat alone and asked me where I was going. That was when it occurred to me that he was a plainclothes policeman, making sure that no demonstrators or troublemakers would take that bus to or past the Blue House, holding placards up to the bus windows.
Because he asked me my destination without showing me an ID or introducing himself, I decided to be a little cheeky at his expense. I told him I was going to the Blue House to play tennis with the President. He asked if I had an appointment, and I replied of course I did.
Confused, he went to the front of the bus and spoke to someone on a two-way radio. After a minute or so he came back to ask more questions. By that stage, we were nearly at my stop, so I pre-empted him by confessing the true nature of my journey.
Seemingly satisfied, the plainclothes officer went back to his seat at the front of the bus. He never asked me anything again. Bus route 8000 was discontinued a few years later ― a pity, because it was a nice journey and the bus was never full.
In August 2010, after almost two-and-a-half years at KOCIS and Korea.net, I decided I had learned all that I could and done all there was to do, and so I resigned. It was time for a new adventure. The day after my last day at KOCIS, I landed in Pyongyang (see Part 44).
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