While there are a total of 24 news agencies in operation, few news agencies play dominant roles as news providers, while Yonhap News Agency (YNA) plays a key role as the national news agency. As mandated by law, YNA (2018) provides news, pictures, and other data, domestically and overseas, to the state and other public institutions and research organisations. YNA serves the purposes of “protect[ing] information sovereignty, narrow[ing] the information divide and satisfy[ing] citizens’ right to know” (Ministry of Culture, Sports, and Tourism, 2017: art. 10, 1–2). YNA is funded by the Korea News Agency Commission, which was founded to govern the news agency. The seven board members of Korea News Agency Commission are appointed by the President, with three of them nominated by the National Assembly Speaker and one each by the Korean Association of Newspapers and the Korean Broadcasters Association. Korea News Agency Commission owns 30.77 per cent of the agency, with the rest of the shares distributed among public broadcasting companies and other national dailies. YNA has been criticised at different points in its history for holding pro-government views, and given the ownership structure of YNA, concerns have been raised about the internal pressure on fair reporting standards.
YNA doesn’t just supply domestic news media with news content, but also directly services the news audience, which has given rise to some complaints about it taking readership shares from non-government funded news media. While YNA services almost 200 newspapers, broadcasters, and online news media – including all the major media conglomerates – it also operates its own website and has partnered with major Internet portals to be displayed as a news outlet alongside its partners. Newsis and News1 also supply news to major media groups and Internet portals as two of the major commercial news agencies, but both are controlled by the same media group. As for the overseas network, they are partnered with Associated Press in the US and Xinhua News Agency in China and supply domestic news media with foreign news content. YNA has partnerships with many major news agencies – Associated Press, Reuters, and Agence France-Presse, to name some – with a total of 88 partner news agencies. In 2019, YNA had 34 reporters in 23 major cities in 18 countries, which was a significant drop from 47 correspondents in 36 major cities in 27 countries in 2014 (Korea Press Foundation, 2019d). YNA’s downward trend in the number of overseas correspondents is in line with an overall industry cutback on overseas networks, as digital platforms like YouTube, social media, and news media websites have made it easier and much faster to access information from around the world.
Outside of the partnership with news agencies, newspapers and broadcasters do not have any active content syndication in South Korea. Most of the major print national dailies and national broadcasters have their own correspondents in the US, Japan, and China, but few news outlets have correspondents in other parts of the world, with a couple in Europe and even fewer in Southeast Asia and Africa. Without the means to conduct first-hand original reporting, these news outlets must rely on major news sources abroad for international news, at the risk of also absorbing political and cultural biases. This explains the criticisms of Korean news media for lacking international news and perspectives.
The Korean Journalists Survey 2019 showed that journalists are most reliant on field investigation and direct interviews with the source, but that they also use several different sources including professional reports, press releases, tips from general public, and reports from other news media (Korea Press Foundation, 2019c). When asked to rate how much they rely on each news source on of a five-point Likert scale, the journalists gave press releases an average score of 3.45, ranking it in third place in news sources they rely on the most, after field investigation and expert reports and data. Coverage from a different news outlet ranked fifth place at 3.06, after tips from the general public (3.16). A comparison of different media outlets showed that journalists from news broadcasters were most reliant on field investigation (4.14), followed by journalists from print newspapers (4.05) and those from news agencies (4.03). On the other hand, journalists from news agencies relied on press releases (3.64) more than journalists from any other news outlets did. When asked to evaluate the reporting conditions, easy access to news sources and informants and informant cooperation were rated the highest (3.29 and 3.19, respectively), and access to expert reports and data was rated the third (3.01). Access to information upon request, however, was low overall (2.87), indicating possible challenges in the research stage of reporting.
The 2018 Media Diversity Survey showed the lack of representation in news media in terms of diversity in news-making (Wook-jae et al., 2018). The survey offered a look into diversity in the six major television channels. None of the channels represented a sexual minority in their news programmes; the majority of news informants were men (74.4%), while only 25.6 per cent were women. 55.7 per cent of the news informants were between ages 50 and 69, and considering that only 27.7 per cent of the population is in this age group in the 2018 resident registration survey, the survey suggests that privileged groups in the traditional patriarchal society are over-represented. The news sourcing patterns also reflect a substantial reliance on elite sources: 34.7 per cent of informants on television news were from management-level positions, although they account for only 0.8 per cent of the population in reality, and 29.7 per cent of the informants were experts in their fields, while they represent only 12.6 per cent of the population.
Gender diversity is still lacking in many ways; however, it is worth noting that there is clearly increasing awareness in terms of gender-sensitive expressions in news reports. Some newspapers make extra efforts to balance the gender ratios of opinion-column writers who are recruited from outside.
In terms of active investigative journalism, South Korea is at a turning-point. Younger reporters feel the need to drastically increase investigative journalism to differentiate themselves as a quality news outlet, but senior reporters and desks are a bit hesitant, partly due to cost concerns and uncertainty related to successful reporting.
