Facing decreasing attention from outlets in a portal-oreinted media environment, South Korean data journalists seek change despite rapidly declining media outlets’ interest.
Data journalism was introduced and spotlighted in Korea in the 2010s but has faced a crisis as media outlets recently eliminated their dedicated teams and key personnel left. KBS, Korea’s public broadcaster, and YTN, a 24-hour news channel, abolished their data journalism team last year.
Bae Yeo-Woon, a data journalist for the Korean broadcaster SBS, cites the media ecosystem centred on web portals and the competition on daily news as the reasons. Korea has a unique structure in which most articles are consumed on Naver, the No. 1 search engine and web portal.
Bae explained: “Media companies make profits through page views of daily news on web portals. Teams producing one or two monthly stories are considered less effective. In addition, the data journalism team needs engineers and designers for interactive articles, but it is not easy to hire them for outlets that lack reporters.”
However, some news outlets and data journalists still believe that data-driven investigative reporting is essential. SBS has recently included their data contents in its subscription model to determine who the audience is. “We are experimenting through readership analysis so that articles from the data journalism team can spread spontaneously away from web portals,” Bae said.