My life at a Korean law firm (part 43)
By Jacco Zwetsloot
Ever since the foundation of the Republic of Korea in 1948, there have been variously named government bodies and ministries responsible for promoting Korea's good image abroad. This once exclusively took the form of publications ― books, pamphlets, posters and calendars ― but in the digital age this work expanded into the internet space, with the
Korean government's official website Korea.net
starting in 1999. Why the .net domain was chosen rather than .go.kr was never clear to me.
In early 2008 I saw a job advertisement. Korea.net was looking for someone to replace its chief English editor and writer. I applied and got called in for an interview and a test edit. The then head of the team, a Mr. Kim, told me that if I got the job I would have to use only American spelling and grammar conventions. I assured him that I had no problem with this.
I was offered the job, and I took it because the pay was adequate and, after the tumultuous time with the company I had helped found, I wanted a calm, secure workplace where I could learn things. In early March I began work.
Korea.net is one section in what was then called KOIS, the Korea Overseas Information Service, which in turn was part of the Ministry of Information and Communication. About a month after I started, that Ministry was closed down, and the office of KOIS (including Korea.net) was folded into the Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism.
When I began, our office was in a room on the fourth floor of the building that is now the National Museum of Korean Contemporary History, which lies beside the US embassy, and appears to be its twin.
I believe that the buildings were built simultaneously and share the same architect, and that the building where I worked was originally the Korean office of USAID. When we joined the culture ministry, we were relocated to a building owned by the KOLON corporation facing the Gyeongbok Palace west wall.
Korea.net is responsible for the Korean government's public relations, so a lot of its work is producing content to show the good work that the government is doing, or to promote its policies.
But a certain amount of its content is about Korea as a country, so there are articles about festivals, and the “five Hans” (Hanbok, Hanok, Hallyu, Hansik and Hangeul). To a certain extent, this meant there was overlap with what Korea.net does, and the work of the
(KTO).
The slogan of Korea.net when I was there was “Dynamic Korea,” while the slogan for the KTO at the same time was the oft-ridiculed “Korea Sparkling.” Some of my friends could never separate the two and believe to this day I worked for the KTO.
One of the first things I did on starting the job was to troll the site for the words “Koran” and “pubic.” It's amazing how easily those words slip through the spell-checks and onto the system, in place of “Korean” and “public.” I found a few embarrassing cases of both words and corrected them.
My main job in the beginning was to go through textual content written by my Korean colleagues and “clean it up” before publication. Above me there was a chief of the whole Korea.net team, who oversaw our work and made editorial decisions.
At each morning's editorial meeting, he would farm out story ideas to the Korean staff, who would then produce the content and upload it to the system for me to go over. Sometimes the stories were researched and written from scratch, while at other times they were “curated” from previous articles about the same topic or simply translated from government press releases with some details added.
The number of stories (or parts of stories) that came past my desk about similar topics was surprising. I cannot remember how many times I read about Korea's four seasons, the uniqueness of Hangeul, Korea's rightful ownership of Dokdo, the healthful properties of Korean cuisine, or that Korea was “to boost economic ties with [insert country name here].” North Korea, on the other hand, was almost never mentioned except where it intersected with South Korean government policy. This bored me after a short while, and I know my Korean colleagues felt the same, but these were the stories the Korean government wanted to push, and we had to push them.
One would be forgiven for thinking every day was a good day in Korea, from reading Korea.net. Bad news was rarely discussed. After a disastrous oil spill off the coast near the town of Taean, stories were posted about volunteers going to clean the beaches, and later about how the environment had been successfully cleaned up and an environmental catastrophe averted.
In the spring of 2008, the whole KOIS team was taken on a tour of part of the Cheong Wa Dae complex. It was my only time there, and I still drink coffee from the souvenir presidential mug we all received. During the tour, my boss asked me to write a biographical story about President Lee Myung-bak after our return.
I was interested to learn that Lee Myung-bak was born in Osaka in 1941 and moved to Korea after the end of the World War II. I felt that this point should be in the story and hoped it could somehow be used to foster (a word used often at Korea.net) good relations between the two Northeast Asian neighbor states. However, I was told his birthplace was to be left out. So I gathered information and did the necessary research, but each time I tried to write the article, something within me balked and the project would stall. There were already many puff pieces about the president on the website, so I figured one story less probably would not make a difference. That story never got written.