Covering the hermit regime: A comparison of North Korea coverage at the Associated Press and NK News

Abstract

How do traditional and new media outlets cover North Korea? This article analyzes content at NK News – a US-based niche news site – and the AP in 2014. I look at the ‘softness’ and ‘hardness’ of content as well as thematic diversity. Methodologically, I use quantitative content analysis as well as in-depth interviews. I find the AP coverage to be softer in theme than NK News and also find more diversity of perspectives at the latter. Although the AP is one of only five international media outlets with Pyongyang bureaus, it was short-staffed, with most of the articles written by a single person in the capital. In contrast, NK News had 26 people writing from three continents, including people with expertise in diplomacy, the military, and technology. Despite the advantages of having physical presence in Pyongyang, AP coverage did little more than to cover just the basics, with stories limited to a handful of themes like sports and the arrests of Americans in North Korea.

Keywords

Content analysis digital journalism international journalism international news media sociology mixed methods news values North Korea

Introduction

On Christmas Eve of 2013, the Straits Times of Singapore reported that North Korean leader Kim Jong-Un had his uncle Jang Song-Thaek eaten alive by a pack of over 100 dogs. Based entirely on a story by the Hong Kong tabloid Wen Pei Po, the graphic tale spread globally and appeared in major American outlets such as NBC News and the New York Daily News. Unsurprisingly, the story turned out to be hoax, with more reputable sources confirming that Jang had, in fact, been executed by a firing squad (Smith, 2014). Criticizing the erroneous Jang-fed-to-dogs coverage, Max Fisher of the Washington Post commented on the ubiquity of sensationalistic stories about North Korea, quoting fellow journalist Isaac Fish’s observation that ‘as an American journalist you can write almost anything you want about North Korea and people will just accept it’ (Fisher, 2014).

As this episode shows, there has been an increasing awareness of the prevalence of bad journalism surrounding North Korea in recent years. While some misleading news stories were relatively benign – for instance, reportage on a nonexistent measles epidemic in 2015 (Kim, 2015) – others were more problematic, with sensationalistic stories escalating tensions in a country dangerously close to a nuclear war. When Kim Jong-Nam – half-brother of the North Korean leader – was assassinated in Malaysia in February 2017, the Kyodo News Agency jumped the gun not once but twice, first by reporting that both of the female suspects may already be dead and later by alleging that one of the women held a South Korean passport (Straits Times, 2017). Two months later, US media wrongly reported that USS Carl Vinson was heading toward North Korea, setting off global panic over the outbreak of a nuclear war (Westcott, 2017). As Choe Sang-Hun of the New York Times (NYT) pointed out, such gaffes reveal an unhealthy news ecosystem where journalists feed off rumors gleaned from defectors and government intelligence, often with dire geopolitical consequences (Choe, 2016). Yet, due to a general lack of access to North Korea, its government, and its people, journalists are often left to find new ways to navigate a beat defined by gossip and a pervading sense of unknowability.

This article considers the state of news coverage about North Korea, a country that largely thwarts journalistic access despite the outside world’s increasing interest. Foreign reporting has rapidly evolved in recent years, as single-subject, digital-native outlets have sprung up, in some cases filling the news vacuum created as traditional news outlets continue to shutter foreign bureaus. To understand how effectively emerging international journalistic practices help cover difficult-to-penetrate parts of the globe, this article compares coverage at the Pyongyang bureau of the Associated Press (AP), arguably the one significant foreign media presence in the country, with the coverage produced by NK News, a highly successful news startup covering North Korea from the outside. In particular, I will analyze and compare two dimensions of the content produced by these outlets: first, the amount and type of ‘soft’ news versus ‘hard’ news they covered, and, second, the diversity of themes and perspectives in that coverage. Given the paucity of content analysis of news outlets offering comprehensive coverage of North Korea, this article aims to enhance our understanding of news about that country. By doing so, it also hopes to shed light on the evolving practices of foreign correspondence in other hard-to-reach countries.

Conceptual framework: Virtual foreign bureaus, softness/hardness of news, and multiperspectivism

North Korea is one of the most restrictive places for foreign correspondents to cover. There is an utter lack of information about the country, whose citizens do not have access to the Internet or the freedom to travel domestically (Committee to Protect Journalists, 2015). Only five international news outlets have Pyongyang bureaus: the AP (USA), Agence France-Presse (France), Kyodo (Japan), Xinhua (China), and TASS (Russia) (Agence France-Presse, 2016). These correspondents are extremely limited in where they can go and to whom they can talk, operating under situations similar to journalists covering the former Soviet Union and the dictatorial regimes in Central Asia.

While North Korea may be an extreme example of restricted journalistic access, given its relatively tiny footprint of Western foreign correspondents, other parts of the world have been increasingly difficult for news organizations to cover after seeing a significant decline in correspondents over recent years. In the dominant reporting model of the postwar decades of 20th century, journalists would physically report from foreign bureaus in the major capital cities of nation-states. As late as 1998, there were nearly 300 foreign correspondents working for US newspapers; within a decade, that number had shrunk by a quarter (Dell’Orto, 2013).

In this vacuum, however, researchers have documented the emergence of a ‘new’ kind of foreign correspondence. These correspondents include freelancers, citizen journalists, stringers, or various types of entrepreneurial journalists (Bunce, 2011; Palmer, 2015; Sambrook, 2010; Seo, 2016). Also participating in this ecosystem are the journalists hired by international non-governmental organizations (NGOs) like Human Rights Watch to produce stories relevant to their respective causes, which the journalists would then pitch to mainstream outlets (Powers, 2016; Wright, 2016).

Single-subject news sites creating original content are a small but growing factor in foreign news. To emphasize the fact that these digitally native outlets are different from traditional foreign bureaus in many respects (and because they have not yet been analyzed as a separate category of news outlets), I call them virtual foreign bureaus, or VFBs for short. The use of the term ‘virtual’ is meant to stress that these entities operate through mediated networks, as opposed to the on-the-ground branches of hierarchal traditional news outlets. I adopt the definition of ‘virtual’ community from network scholars who understand it as a social community interacting primarily online, creating hubs out of far-flung personal networks and forming communities of affect or communities of interest, even on subjects previously deemed obscure (Castells, 2001; Rheingold, 2000). Journalism scholars have begun using the term ‘virtual newsrooms’ to look beyond the physical spaces of news gathering and analyze the digital platforms being employed (Bunce et al., 2017). My definition of ‘virtual’ does not extend to the synchronous alternate reality, as used, for instance, in game studies (Bell, 2008). Rather, it emphasizes the fact that physically the bulk of the journalistic operation – including sourcing, verification, and editing – is often conducted outside the country being covered. In North Korea, such ‘virtual’ presence can be beneficial both for maintaining journalistic independence and for working within economic constraints. The ‘bureau’ part of the VFB is also important because despite the differences, these news outlets do, in many ways, operate like foreign bureaus of the past, producing original news often syndicated by multiple outlets.

Scholars are increasingly examining the epistemological aspects of online news networks, including the types of international reporting analyzed here. For instance, Hermida (2010) has noted that blogs and social networks can function as ‘para-journalism’, creating an awareness system that provides journalists with a more complex understanding of the world. Similarly, Heinrich (2012) has shown how information flows between social media and journalism, with foreign correspondents often receiving assistance from bloggers and social media users who function as contributors. Scholars have also pointed out changes in the physical temporality of journalistic production and dissemination, where nation-states used to enjoy preeminence. Volkmer (2003) uses the phrase ‘translocation reference system’ to refer to this relationship, where global communication exchange patterns displace previous news borders, which had been primarily organized at the local or national level. With the emergence of digitally abetted foreign reporting, new frameworks cross national boundaries with greater ease, increasing feelings of connectedness (Berglez, 2008; Reese, 2008). Consequently, Hamilton and Jenner (2004) allege that there is little need to lament the decline of traditional international journalism, which was based on ‘anachronistic and static model’ of foreign reporting.

For all the talk about changes in foreign correspondence, content analysis comparing and contrasting ‘old’ media with the ‘new’ has rarely been attempted, partly because of challenges in sampling and representation. North Korea presents a unique opportunity to do this at the country level, partly because it is a relative blank slate when it comes to foreign bureaus and also because of exploding demand for stories about this nuclear power and its eccentric leadership (Metzgar, 2013).

While one could look into many dimensions of North Korea–related coverage, the following analysis focuses on dimensions of soft news. As a concept, soft news – which has been variously defined as stories lacking a public interest angle (Tuchman, 1997), which are not especially time-sensitive (Shoemaker and Cohen, 2005), and which contain personal, emotional, and/or sensationalist components (Van Aelst and Swert, 2009) – has been used widely by media researchers who want to systematically evaluate the changing nature of news and its effect on ‘politically and/or socially relevant perceptions of audiences’ (Reinemann et al., 2011: 232). The overall increase in soft news has been well documented through various normative evaluations (Scott and Gobetz, 1992). Political scientists such as Patterson (2000) and Prior (2003) have voiced worry over the tabloidization of news and its role in creating an ill-informed citizenry. But a growing group of scholars have unveiled a more complicated reality. While soft news consumption can reinforce isolationist tendencies for those uninterested in foreign affairs (Baum, 2002) and make viewers more cynical (Baumgartner and Morris, 2006), soft news can also reach out to new audiences and create new awareness (Hanusch, 2013). Physical foreign bureaus are usually assumed to be necessary for the production of hard news, which typically derives from contact with officials and other sources on the ground. Since soft news does not require government access and is not necessarily time-sensitive, one might suspect a virtual foreign bureau to rely more on soft news:

RQ1. How does North Korea coverage in VFBs compare to that of traditional media outlets in terms of softness of topic, focus, and style?

The second dimension of this analysis centers on the diversity of frames and perspectives. This line of inquiry stems from normative theories pertaining to diversity of viewpoints in foreign news. Research shows that people are more likely to think about political situations in nuanced and complex ways if they are exposed to a broad range of views (Porto, 2007). Traditionally, foreign news in the United States has been dominated by a narrow set of perspectives. For example, Chang et al. (1987) found that ‘audience interest’, ‘threat to US’, ‘timeliness’, ‘threat to world peace’, and ‘US involvement’ were dominant values among foreign correspondents. Furthermore, a high reliance of foreign correspondents on official sources has also been shown to color the nature of coverage (Pedelty, 1995; Sigal, 1986).

Existing research on media coverage about North Korea shows that coverage has been limited to a handful of themes, with the expected centrality of official sources. Dai and Hyun (2010) showed that the threat frame was prominent in media coverage in the United States, China, and South Korea, although specific details differed according to national interest. Within the United States, Lim and Seo (2009) found coverage tends to revolve around three frames: threat, human rights, and dialogue partner. Seo (2009) has also shown that government sources significantly influenced foreign journalists in their perception of North Korea as a rogue state. In addition to framing efforts by foreign governments, Chon (2002) showed the North Korean government to be currying favorable coverage by using visas and travel permits as leverage.

In looking for an alternative to such shortcomings, Gans (1979, 2011) proposed the uptake of ‘multiperspectivism’ or the presence of multiple perspectives in a news product. Gans (2011) called for journalists to overcome the domestication of foreign news that has long been the norm, writing, ‘A revival of foreign news is more necessary than ever, but it must report on foreign affairs other than those involving Americans’ (p. 4). To achieve this, journalists should feature more ordinary people appear in their stories, including those who live outside the capital. It also means decreasing the reliance on official sources and paying attention to regions of the world often ignored in news coverage:

RQ2. How does North Korea coverage in VFBs compare to that of traditional media outlets in terms of thematic diversity?

Methodology

In order to address these inquiries, I will analyze the content of the 2014 news coverage of North Korea from the AP and NK News, each outlet being among the most prominent and prolific producers of North Korea–related news.

The AP was a natural choice. At a time of bureau shutdowns, the significance of the AP in the field of global media has been well documented, with many outlets relying on the agency’s syndicated stories for foreign reporting (Paterson, 2006). Most importantly, in 2012 the AP became the first American media outlet to open a full-fledged Pyongyang bureau, including photographers and television crew.

NK News was chosen to represent the work of VFBs. There are at least 12 regularly updating English-language websites specializing in North Korea–related news. Of them, NK News is the biggest, publishing more than 100 articles per month, unlike many of the smaller news startups which publish at a much lower rate. Also, NK News is the most established, offering a wide range of stories on everything from culture to politics to the economy. Consequently, I was able to compare and contrast the AP’s coverage with that of NK News. This would not have been possible with other websites which focus on narrow niches, like North Korea’s relationship with China (sinonk.com) or technology and IT (northkoreatech.org).

I chose to compare coverage for the year 2014, a relatively unremarkable year in North Korea news and therefore one ideal for analysis. A period that includes major news items – say, the death of Kim Jong-Il – makes for aberrational coverage. Furthermore, since nearly 2 years had passed since the opening of the AP’s Pyongyang bureau in 2012, work routines had the time to stabilize. Similarly, 2014 marked the fourth year that NK News was in operation.

For the AP component of the content analysis, I analyzed all of the articles with a North Korea dateline in 2014 available through LexisNexis (N = 101). To better capture the entirety of the AP’s coverage of North Korea, I also analyzed North Korea–themed articles with South Korean, Japanese, and Chinese datelines. Indeed, the Seoul bureau, with its proximity to and traffic with North Korea, operated as a something of a backup Pyongyang bureau for the AP. Articles were included only if they were primarily about North Korea, excluding stories that dealt with North Korea from a Japanese, Chinese, or South Korean domestic angle. I eliminated 21 update articles that were essentially identical to other stories, counting only the last article. That left me with a grand total of 80 articles to analyze.

To obtain a comparable yet manageable number of articles for comparison from NK News, I sampled articles from six randomly constructed weeks, adding up to 99 out of the 1100 articles they published that year. Constructed weeks have been shown to be more effective than sampling of random days or consecutive days in content analysis (Riffe et al., 1993), and 6 weeks is sufficiently representative to constitute a 1-year population value (Hester and Dougall, 2007; Luke et al., 2011). Unlike the AP, NK News does not use datelines that explicitly identify where the story was written from, although bylines did contain names of authors and where they were based.

To answer RQ1, I used the coding scheme devised by Reinemann et al. (2011), which identifies the scale of softness or hardness in news. This approach focuses on three dimensions: topic, focus and framing, and style. Serious stories that deal with topics such as politics and the economy are considered ‘hard’ (Lehman-Wilzig and Seletzky, 2010). Furthermore, in terms of focus and framing, the broader the societal relevance, the ‘harder’ the news (Curran et al., 2009). Finally, the presence of personal, emotional, and visually oriented narrative styles is often associated with ‘soft’ news (Patterson, 2000). Each of the three dimensions was given numerical values ranging from 0 to 4, meaning a very hard story will have a total value close to 12. The purpose of this scheme is to capture different dimensions of soft versus hard news – including different shades of topical diversity and also those in focus and style – in one comprehensible number.

To answer RQ2, I used a proprietary coding scheme to provide a snapshot of the dominant themes in 2014. I coded all stories into seven prominent themes that emerged organically in my research: ‘politics (domestic) and Kim Jong-Un’, ‘diplomacy and external relations’, ‘military’, ‘economy and technology’, ‘sports’, ‘culture/civilian events’, ‘accident’, and ‘arrest of foreigners’. The category of ‘arrest of foreigners’ was coded separately from ‘diplomacy and external relations’, although arrests usually resulted in diplomatic negotiations. This was because arrest-related stories made up a large chunk of coverage in 2014. In the same vein, ‘sports’ merited its own category separate from ‘culture/civilian events’ due to an unusually high number of stories on the topic. Furthermore, the ‘military’ category captured stories that dealt exclusively with the technical and tactical aspects of the North Korean military.

Coding was conducted from late 2015 into the spring of 2016. A total of 179 articles were coded by two trained coders. In addition to the author, the second coder was a researcher with a doctoral degree in communications. A randomly selected 10 percent subsample (21 stories) was selected for inter-coder reliability. Cohen’s κ values were 0.49 for topics and themes, 0.67 for frames and focus, and 0.92 for style. Findings from content analysis were triangulated by findings from in-person interviews with eight staffers at NK News, as well as published interviews and statements from the two AP reporters working from North Korea, Talmadge and Wong, and various accounts from Jean Lee, the AP’s first Pyongyang correspondent who has since left the organization (Fish, 2014).

Findings and discussion

NK News is not softer

The most apparent finding is that the NK News stories are not softer than those from the AP. In fact, the VFB coverage was slightly harder overall. Out of a possible 12 score for the composite number (with 12 being the hardest and 0 being the softest), the AP stories averaged 8.43, compared to 9.4 for NK News, with a statistically significant p-value of 0.013 (see Table 1).

Table 1.

Softness of news at NK News and AP.

	NK News (N = 99)	AP (N = 80)	Softness difference
Topic (0 softest, 11 hardest)	3.12	2.76	0.36^^
Focus (0 softest, 11 hardest)	2.82	2.41	0.41*
Style (0 softest, 11 hardest)	3.46	3.25	0.21
Composite softness score	9.40	8.43	0.97*

AP: Associated Press.

p < 0.07; *p < 0.05 for two-tailed t-tests.

Initially, the result was surprising, given that news agencies tend to show strength in ‘hard’ stories on politics and the economy, delivered in ‘hard’ styles or impersonal formats. Also, I presumed that VFBs produce a large amount of soft news because they rely less on government or other official sources in Pyongyang.

Upon closer inspection, we can see that the AP stories were softer in both topic and focus, scoring 2.76 (vs 3.12 at NK News) and 2.41 (vs 2.82 at NK News), respectively. For focus, p = 0.012 made the result statistically significant, while for topic p = 0.064 slightly exceeded the conventional value of 0.05. Overall, this means the AP had a lower proportion of stories dealing with governments and public policy decisions compared to NK News.

Looking at the individual themes, however, shows that much of the softness can be attributed to a high prevalence of sports stories, which made up 22 percent (24 out of 80 articles) of all stories for that year at the AP (see Figure 1). In contrast, sports stories at NK News made up a much lower proportion at 7 percent (7 out of 99 articles).

Figure 1.

Breakdown of themes in NK News and AP stories (in percentage).

The AP’s sports stories dominated the headlines throughout the year. The year 2014 began with basketball star Dennis Rodman visiting the North Korean leader Kim Jong-Un. AP reporters covered a ski resort in February, an international marathon in Pyongyang in April, and a visit from Japanese wrestlers in August. In September, the AP wrote no fewer than seven stories about North Korea’s participation in the Asian Games, for which athletes and cheerleaders traveled to South Korea.

Part of the reason for the extensive coverage is that athletic competitions are among the few public events the Pyongyang bureau chief Eric Talmadge was able to attend. An American fluent in Japanese, Talmadge is the second Pyongyang bureau chief, succeeding Jean Lee, a Korean-American (AP, 2013). In 2014, Talmadge’s only other AP colleague in Pyongyang was photographer Maye-E Wong, a photojournalist originally from Singapore. They were joined by senior video journalist Rafael Wober of the TV subsidiary APTN. None of them speak any Korean, meaning they relied heavily on North Korean translators. At NK News, by contrast, three out of six core full-time correspondents speak Korean. The AP’s Talmadge can stay in Pyongyang for only about 10 days a month, spending the rest of the time in Tokyo. Every time Talmadge wants to enter North Korea, he must obtain approval from the North Korean authorities (Farhi, 2015).

In addition to the ease of access, sports events also allow foreign correspondents like Talmadge a window into North Korea’s politics and diplomacy. There are fewer language barriers to worry about, and there are many opportunities to create colorful coverage through photographs. The 8 January Dennis Rodman article titled ‘Rodman sings happy birthday to North Korean leader’ is a good example of such soft news and its tendency toward a visual style of narration (Talmadge, 2014c):

PYONGYANG, North Korea (AP) – Dennis Rodman sang ‘Happy Birthday’ to North Korean leader Kim Jong-Un before leading a squad of former NBA stars in a friendly game Wednesday as part of his ‘basketball diplomacy’ that has been criticized in the United States as naive and laughable.

Rodman dedicated the game to his ‘best friend’ Kim, who along with his wife and other senior officials and their wives watched from a special seating area. The capacity crowd of about 14,000 at the Pyongyang Indoor Stadium clapped loudly as Rodman sang a verse from the birthday song.

It is possible that the percentage of sports stories was unusually high in 2014 due to the Rodman visit and the Asian Games, which take place every 4 years. But it is noteworthy that the rest of the AP coverage was also quite soft, with culture stories about fashion and tourism making up a significant part of coverage. A 26 September story titled ‘Changes afoot in N. Korean capital? In fashion, yes’ is almost tabloid-like in topic as well as style, with all-capitals section headings like ‘WATCH THE SHOES’ and ‘JEANS: THE FINAL FRONTIER’ (Talmadge, 2014b).

Some of the other soft stories were the product of chaperoned trips the AP team took outside Pyongyang. The destinations included Mt Paektu, a site that North Korea likes to bring visitors for symbolic reasons: It is where North Korean founder Kim Il-Sung plotted his anti-Japanese guerilla war and where official lore locates the birthplace of Kim Jong-Il. The AP story from the trip was unusually frank in detailing the restrictions it faced throughout the weeklong road trip (Talmadge, 2014a):

But the trip was on North Korea’s terms. There would be no stopping to interview random people like the ones at Kaema. Even on the loneliest highways, we would never be without a ‘minder’, whose job was to monitor and supervise our activities. We were not to take photographs of any checkpoints or military installations, or talk to people we happened to see along the way. For the most part, we were not to detour from our pre-approved route, which, to no one’s surprise, didn’t include nuclear facilities or prison camps.

To sum up, AP coverage of North Korea in 2014 leaned heavily toward soft themes, with half of the stories dealing with sports, culture, and the arrest of foreigners. In other words, the AP’s story selection was dictated by physical access: If reporters could attend an event and get a quote, they wrote a story out of it. Otherwise, there was no coverage.

In contrast, NK News stories were thematically harder, perhaps because it did not have an accredited correspondent in Pyongyang and thus did not have to worry about getting its access revoked. It devoted much more space to three categories, with high scores for hardness: external relations, military affairs, and the economy. For example, stories about North Korea’s weapons and military developments made up a significant 13 percent of NK News stories, whereas AP had none. In military stories, NK News did not just source academics and officials from relevant governments and United Nations (UN) agencies; it also delved into Internet databases. For example, a 21 August story titled ‘Video emerges of North Korean ballistic missile launches’ uses a YouTube video as the starting point for an investigation that showed earlier photos released by North Korea may have been photoshopped:

According to Scott LaFoy, a Washington D.C. based researcher who previously analysed the published images of the launch, the video footage may add credence to that theory. ‘I think it [the video] actually seriously bolsters the argument that they are photoshopped, as the footage at 1:04 does show the missile launch, but the missile’s body is far too small and the illumination from its trail is tiny in comparison to what the pictures show’, LaFoy told NK News.

Chad O’Carroll of NK News said he values military stories for reasons of prestige as well as profit: He thinks they help build NK News’ reputation among influential policymakers in key countries who may be able to buy institutional subscriptions. In other words, he shares the desire of major outlets to appeal to an elite audience.

NK news has kept tabs on its audience through reader surveys and web analytics. A 2012 survey showed that readers of NK News were most interested in two categories of stories: in-depth coverage offering opinion and analysis, and news about everyday life in North Korea:

We have two audiences. On the one hand we have the specialist, the professors and military … [On the other hand] there’s also an audience who for good or for bad [are] interested in North Korea because it is kind of like pornography, if you will, they have a really strange desire to know what it’s like to live in extremely oppressive society. It’s like the moon, so different. (Chad O’Carroll, 22 July 2014, personal communication)

After the survey, NK News started to produce more soft news. For example, it launched the ‘Ask a North Korean’ section, where defectors answered reader’s queries about everyday life in the country. Soft news also affords partnerships with mainstream outlets; NK News’ articles about everyday life have often been picked up by the Guardian’s World Networks. Overall, though, these soft news stories constituted a relatively small part of NK News.

NK News is more multiperspectival

Content analysis of the AP and NK News shows that the former – despite the access to Pyongyang and other institutional resources – is producing content largely lacking diversity and multiple perspectives, with a limited range of topics and themes covered. In comparison, NK News has managed to create a more diverse menu of stories that reach out to different audiences and more closely adheres to the ideals of multiperspectivism mentioned earlier.

When it comes to the bylines and datelines at the AP, 53 out of 80 articles were written from North Korea, with 47 from Pyongyang and 6 from other parts of the country. Two-thirds of the articles the AP wrote from North Korea (34 out of 53 articles) carried the byline of Eric Talmadge, the bureau chief. The rest – 19 articles – did not carry any byline. In addition, four other AP reporters in Seoul, Beijing, and Tokyo each wrote one North Korea–related article in 2014. This means that a majority of the AP stories were written by one man, Talmadge, whose access to North Korea was limited to about 10 days a month.

Compare that with NK News, which has a far more diverse authorship. For the constructed 6-week period in 2014, there were a total of 26 different authors. The most prolific reporters were London-based writers Rob York (16 articles) and Hamish Macdonald (15), whose combined work constituted one-third of the articles. The 26 writers were concentrated in London (10 reporters) and Seoul (6), but there was a significant East Coast US faction with Washington, DC (2), New York City (2), Philadelphia (1), and Boston (1) all represented. In East Asia and the Pacific, reporters were stationed in Tokyo (1), Hong Kong (1), and Honolulu (1).

This list of NK News writers is representative of the extent of the human network that the outlet has built since its founding. Although NK News had only six full-time writers at the time, O’Carroll counts over 200 people as contributors. About half of them are unpaid interns who work for a short period and usually hail from South Korea or the United States. Graduate students who focus on North Korean studies, as well scholars and think tank researchers in the field, make up another substantial portion of the talent pool. Also in the stable are prominent figures like John Everard, the former British ambassador to North Korea, and Moon Chung-in, a former diplomatic advisor involved in South Korea’s Sunshine Policy of engaging North Korea (NK News, n.d.).

By comparison, the AP lacked both manpower and specialist knowledge; remember the Pyongyang bureau chief did not even speak Korean. The emerging picture of the AP bureau is one of making do with limited resources, mostly by covering a bare minimum of breaking news stories in North Korea that relate to Americans in one way or another.

A good example is the AP’s coverage of Americans arrested in North Korea. In 2014, there were three Americans behind bars: Korean-American Kenneth Bae serving a sentence for missionary activities; Matthew Miller, a 24-year-old whose request for asylum in North Korea led to charges of espionage; and James Fowle, who had entered North Korea as a tourist but was arrested on charges of proselytism after leaving his Bible in a hotel room. Stories related to these three people made up 16 percent (13 out of 80 stories) of the AP’s entire coverage of North Korea in 2014; at NK News, the proportion was almost half that (9 percent). The extreme nature of these stories – in which Americans who started out as tourists ended up receiving sentences of as many as 15 years of hard labor – captivated the attention of the news outlets back home and kept the AP’s Pyongyang office busy. The AP literally had a front row view of the scene and often obtained detainee interviews, whether solo or with other foreign media outlets. At the time, North Korea was reportedly eager to use the prisoners to attract a high-level American delegation, which it hoped could enhance the profile of the regime and catalyze political developments like economic assistance and the easing of sanctions.

As time went on, however, the AP’s own coverage suggested that the news agency was tired of serving as a tool of a North Korean regime hoping to elicit diplomatic bounties. One such article dated 25 September put this in frank terms as it discussed American prisoner Matthew Miller, who was serving a 6-year sentence in Pyongyang:

Under close guard and with only enough time to respond to one question, 24-year-old Matthew Miller spoke briefly to an Associated Press Television journalist at a Pyongyang hotel, where he had been brought to make a phone call to his family.

… This is the fourth time North Korea’s government, normally one of the most secretive in the world, has produced an American detainee before The Associated Press. It has given no reason for its actions. One possibility is that it is trying to pressure the U.S. government to send a prominent high-level representative to negotiate Miller’s release, as has happened with some previous detainees. (AP, 2014)

While the allure of such American-related stories is obvious and understandable, the AP did not write many other stories about diplomacy or North Korea’s relationship with the outside world. Stories about diplomacy and external relations made up only 14 percent of the AP’s coverage, while making up 33 percent at NK News, where stories on these topics were written from different perspectives by people around the world. One story looked into North Korea’s military cooperation with Syria and another investigated its trade relations with China, using satellite pictures of the border region to gauge the flow of goods. In addition, NK News stories dealt not only with facts but also with the nuances of everyday life.

My investigation showed the AP to be a news agency that is doing the bare minimum, dutifully covering American-facing breaking news like the arrests of US citizens and easy-to-report stories like sporting events. It seeks to make the most of its Pyongyang presence by taking occasional excursions into the rest of the country and capturing photographs. But at the end of the day, the news agency finds itself unable to pursue new angles or seek new sources. Although in theory the Seoul and Tokyo bureaus could collaborate on North Korea–related projects – for instance running sensitive stories on their bylines to avoid friction with the Pyongyang regime – I could not find any evidence of such reporting despite my careful reading of the year’s AP articles.

In contrast, NK News is more proactive, discovering new stories from data troves, books, and social media. NK News represents a wider range of perspectives, drawing from a globally dispersed network representing different nationalities and life trajectories. Staffers at NK News frequently seek out high-tech sources of information like satellite photographs and maritime traffic data to tell fresh stories about an elusive regime. Because its journalists included North Korean defectors as well as American scholars, they naturally had different takes on topics, so multiperspectivism happened organically.

I also saw that NK News is trying to provide coverage that is more nuanced and contextual, overcoming the ‘freak’ or ‘weird’ frame that pushes so much North Korea–related coverage into the realm of sensationalism. A 9 October 2014 article, for example, literally asks readers to put themselves in the shoes of North Koreans:

So let’s put ourselves in the shoes of those who grow up thinking that North Korea really is the best possible country to live in; a place where the current leader truly inspires people. And what better place to start than primary school?

… North Korea derives most its domestic legitimacy from its origins as a ‘guerrilla state’ (or a ‘partisan state’), which fought for the independence of the whole Korean Peninsula, first against the Japanese colonizers and then against the U.S. in the Korean War. This is what every child in North Korea knows as soon as he or she learns to read. (Spezza, 2014)

Conclusion: Toward a hybrid foreign correspondence?

To some extent, this article confirms existing research documenting the decline of foreign bureaus. The Pyongyang bureau of the AP, despite its prestige, is essentially a one-man operation that barely scratches the surface of the country it is charged with covering. One may expect that this respected news institution would have the resources and expertise to cover North Korea from many different angles, but such is not the case. The AP limited its coverage to a handful of themes like sports and the arrests of Americans, coverage that is largely formulaic and centered on US interests. Furthermore, access did not enhance the depth and breadth of reporting, but compromised it. The tradeoff between access and journalistic freedom also leads to a long-standing question of ethics: Bearing witness is important, but at what cost? More than half a century later, debate lingers over the ethics of the AP’s concessions to Nazi Germany (Oltermann, 2016).

At NK News, the flexibility of its structure allows it to avoid many of the costs associated with covering North Korea. Its workflow is more collaborative and globally dispersed. The relative value of human testimony – and of official government sources – diminishes with access to crowdsourcing and data from open-source communities and social networks. Under these emerging conditions, news produced by NK News emerged as more multiperspectival than its competitors at the AP.

While this article analyzed the differences between the AP and NK News, it is important to note that the two news organizations look increasingly similar. For one, both are actively capitalizing on the popularity potential of soft news. This is part of a greater trend, particularly among cousins of VFBs like Vice News, which has attracted a younger audience to North Korea coverage with its soft news format, for instance tagging along on Dennis Rodman’s visit to North Korea (Vice, 2013). The AP has also been experimenting with soft storytelling framing and formats online, with its Pyongyang correspondents running hugely successful social media accounts on Instagram, posting hundreds of photographs providing a rich, nuanced, and complex picture of North Korea. In a mirror image of the AP’s experiments online, NK News has been moving closer to traditional foreign correspondence by sending its reporters to Pyongyang for the first time in spring 2017, securing the much-coveted Pyongyang byline (O’Carroll, 2017).

Does this mean the world is seeing the emergence of a hybrid foreign correspondence in North Korea, where the norms and cultures of traditional journalism as well as the digital-born variants like VFBs are fusing together to create a distinctive form of foreign correspondence? Maybe. The NYT, in particular, has been aggressively pursuing and promoting its data journalism pieces on North Korea. An interactive feature published on 5 July 2017 visualizes North Korea’s infrastructure projects by using time-series satellite pictures and pictures mined from North Korea’s state-run media. Employing a soft news style more typical of Buzzfeed, this NYT piece prominently featured a large collage of images of Kim Jong-Un (Peçanha and Ma, 2017). In September, another NYT piece on North Korean missiles featured maps, pictures, figures, and illustrations to analyze the threat of its missiles from different angles, ranging from rocket technology to US defense readiness (Broad et al., 2017).

To what extent are such findings generalizable outside North Korea? Are there other instances in which remote reporting works better than shoe-leather reporting on the ground? After all, few countries are as inaccessible as North Korea, and it is quite possible that the near-absence of traditional media has led the ‘new’ foreign media to evolve in a unique way. However, one sees the emergence of similar digitally native outlets in other hard-to-reach places. The London-based Tehran Bureau, a news startup partnering with the Guardian, has been lauded for its astute coverage of politics in Iran (Niknejad, 2014). In covering the Syrian Civil War, the NYT worked with the UK-based Brown Moses Blog to break stories on arms trafficking (Weaver, 2013). Scholars and practitioners alike could benefit from more research on cross-pollination that combines the best of traditional reporting with that of digitally native variants like VFBs. Findings from this article thus call for further empirical analysis of not only the new tools and formats of foreign reporting but also of category-defying content and new styles of partnership and cooperation across outlets and platforms.

Footnotes

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

ORCID iD

Soomin Seo

Author biography

Soomin Seo is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Journalism and a Member of the Media and Communication Doctoral Program at Temple University in Philadelphia, USA. She received her PhD in communications at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism. Her work has appeared in publications such as Journalism Studies and Columbia Journalism Review. She is also a former journalist who worked for international news outlets.

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