One winter night in 2015, a 29-year-man died during a hit-and-run crash in a small town of Korea. He was on the way home with custard cream bread for his heavily pregnant wife.
A few days later, his brother posted the details of the tragedy in Bobae Dream, the online cafe for car lovers. His story touched many members. Some started investigating the case with CCTV footage. Many of them are knowledgeable about cars and narrowed down what type of vehicles were involved.
After two weeks, an eye-witness report came from a member of Bobae Dream who works in a repair shop near where the accident happened: allegedly someone had bought a new car part that night. This information grabbed the media’s attention and journalists published the story. The same day, as the pressure of being caught mounted, the driver responsible for the hit-and-run delivered himself to the police.
What are online cafes?
Unlike the rest of the world, Twitter is scarcely used in Korea. Instead, early-internet style message boards are a veritable gold mine for journalists looking for their next scoop.
Bobae Dream is just one example. Dcinside is the biggest platform with about 2,000 cafes. Launched in 1999, currently, the number of visitors per day is 2m, and the total number of pageview per day reaches 100m.
There are so many extraordinary things happening in Korea’s online cafes. There are all sorts of online cafes for idol lovers to new-parents. You name it, there’s an online cafe for it.
Why are online cafes so popular?
South Korea is one of the most connected countries in the world. Its fast internet speed and prevalence of smartphone use makes it easy for people to connect .
But according to a survey by the Reuters Institute’s digital news report, Korean’s trust in news is incredibly low. In Korea a journalist is openly called ‘Giregi’, which is a compound word of ‘Journalist’ and ‘Rubbish’. ‘Rubbish journalist’ came from a history of journalists both writing clickbait news headlines and also manipulating public opinions.
This means, instead of going to journalists, ordinary Koreans – like the brother of the hit-and-run victim – would prefer to share their story online. As a result, Korean journalists are learning the hard way what happens when you break the public contract.
How do journalists use online cafes?
Online cafes look similar to online forums in the last century. People can hold conversations in the form of posted messages. Each cafe has many sub-message boards, each of which may have a theme, such as shopping tips, humour and politics.
One user of an online cafe for women in their 20’s said she could ask anonymously for information about abortion which she couldn’t imagine asking her close friends. In the online cafe, you can meet similar types of people to you making it easy for people to share their thoughts and it’s free to join.
For journalists this makes online cafes a great source for finding out public opinions on current issues. Many Korean investigative journalists regularly post to get interviewees, or find information on sensitive issues. Increasingly, some of Korea’s best journalism is coming out of online cafes.