Involving the community in Korean news media
Whether it’s the recent historical summit between South Korea’s Moon Jae In and North Korean leader Kim Jung Un, the K-pop boy band BTS taking center stage at the American Music Awards, or the impeachment of President Park Geun Hye — there’s no shortage of activity in the country’s news cycle.
Despite the apparent overflow of international headliners, Korean news media faces serious challenges to its survival. The problem isn’t that Koreans are apathetic to what’s going on or that they don’t read the news. The problem lies in a new consumption dependence on TV and the country’s top portal websites (i.e. Naver and Daum). Portal sites are major content aggregators that allow Koreans to do everything from read the news, shop for groceries, and create social networks.
While portal sites help increase newspaper visibility to a broad audience, they drive away direct web traffic and advertising revenue from new media websites. In ‘2016 Naver alone generated US$2.7bn, which is more than newspapers (US$1.5bn) and terrestrial broadcasters (US$1.1bn) put together.’
The dependence on portal sites also impacts brands’ recognition for publishers and the trust their readers have in them.
In this difficult context, enter the Seoul Editors Lab a two-day media hackathon (13–14 April 2018) hosted by Global Editors Network (GEN) in partnership with the Google News Initiative and Media Today. The theme of the hackathon ‘engagement and community building’ encouraged participants to think about:
How can newsrooms better understand and serve the needs of their audiences? How can they find their audiences, make the news more meaningful to them, and inspire action and community engagement? What tools will help foster constructive and productive discussion among newsrooms and members of the public? (Seoul Editors Lab 2018)
Following an opening of the event by Sarah Toporoff, the Programme Manager of the Global Editors Network, Lee Jeonghwan, CEO of Media Today presented on the challenges facing Korean news media, including the problem presented by portal sites. Other speakers such as Jeong Soo Kang, the Head of a media startup accelerator called Mediati, and Ikhyeon Kim, the ZDNet Korea Media Lab followed suite to contextualise the problems and offer potential solutions.
Irene Jay Liu of the Google News Lab Initiative introduced examples of ‘engaged journalism’ where ordinary citizens get involved in the news making process such as Hearken, a company that uses technology to help newsrooms to better involve the community into the content-creation process. Liu suggested that technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI) technology could be leveraged to moderate conversations and thereby making way for more meaningful community engagement.
Stephanie Snyder of Hearken joined via video conference from Denver, Colorado introduced how Hearken’s back-end system allows news organisations to move away from traditional to public-powered story cycles. By bringing readers into the story making process, newsrooms can increase reader engagement, generate higher ad revenues, and increase brand royalty said Synder.
Korea-based organisations that increased engagement and community building by leveraging technology also presented on their work. Parti, a democracy activists union shared ways that they develop IT platforms and on/offline communities to shed light on overlooked social issues such as feminism and children’s rights. Seo Jeongho of YTN, the first 24-hour news TV channel explained that using social media and citizen eyewitness reporting helped increase their following and revenue.
Once the keynotes presentations ended and networking and the actual hackathon began, there was an unmistakable youthful energy and excitement in the room.
Egoing Lee, a jury member who created Everyday Coding and Open Tutorials (a website/NGO dedicated to teaching programming) commented, ‘everyone here is affiliated with pre-existing organisations. The legacy attached to news media companies makes it difficult to innovate. However, a situation like this where you don’t have any restrictions liberates one to try to do things freely. I’m excited to see what kind of fun things can be created in this type of situation.’
Some of the participating teams came from newsrooms such as Money Today and Hankyoreh. However, there were participants who formed more spontaneously just ahead of the hackathon. Lim Min Chul, a journalist from the IT news website ZDNet Korea, said that this developer and designer ‘sent me an email and asked if I would be interested in the Editors Lab since I wrote tech-related articles. So, I replied to say that I was interested and we became a team.’
Although it started out on a fun note, as time went on, the atmosphere at the 2018 Seoul Editors Lab Apart became progressively intense. Apart from meal times and mentorship sessions, participants were engrossed in their work. Some teams talked with teammates regularly, while others seemed to have delegated tasks early on and were absorbed by separate work. A couple hours before the presentation time, I was talking to some jury members and we stopped our conversation multiple times because it seemed like we were the only people talking in a room full of over 40 people.
Once the anticipated presentations began, it was interesting to see the different ways in which teams interpreted the problems faced by Korean news media and what they saw as appropriate solutions.
One team focused on the problem of lack of minority voices in news reporting in Korea, while another suggested that data visualisation could help citizens engage in more civilised dialogue.
Many teams wanted to involve readers as co-creators of content, but the scale of involvement varied from simply wanting to improve the user experience of commenting at the end of an article to providing monetary rewards for content or active participation.
The winner of the 2018 Seoul Editors Lab was the team from Money Today who presented their idea called Connection, a real-time chatting plug-in/Chrome extension to connect readers who are reading the same news article on different websites. This would help bring together readers to have a shared discussion on the news article instead of having polarised discussions on separate comment threads.
Youngshin Cho, Senior Research Fellow of the SK Research Institute, a member of the jury, commented that he thought the Money Today won because ‘Korean media revolves around portal sites. It’s a system where you can’t get out of the portal sites. However, the team that won today tried to address this problem.’
Close contenders of the competition were teams representing Korea Exposé (Special Mention) and Kongdole Productions (Special Mention and Public Choice Award).
Korea Exposé created a service called LIT, a platform that treats news reading like a hobby by getting young people to curate their news consumption and preferences much in the way they would their music tastes on Spotify or film and TV favourites on Netflix.
Kongdole Productions created a platform called Ssang ssang news that allows anyone to upload and get compensated for eyewitness videos.
All of the participants offered some innovative solutions to make news media more engaging for people of all ages and backgrounds and relevant in an age of citizen journalism. News media is not traditionally seen as an industry that aggressively pursues R&D and innovation. However, the ideas generated from this year’s hackathon suggested that the rewards for engagement and community building would provide real-industry benefits for journalism such as increased trust, web traffic, and profits.
Now that the hackathon is over, the real question is how the Global Editors Lab and other partnering organisations can help participants and others interested in innovating for news media to continue their good work. What kind of engagement and community building is necessary to make the spirit of innovation live on past hackathons like this? What kind of incentive structures can make it financially viable to innovate?
There are indeed plans for continued mentorship opportunities and community events to support the participants beyond the 2018 Seoul Editors Lab. As part of a follow-up program, one deserving team will be assigned a mentor to embed with them and develop their prototype into a product. The group will gather again to see how all of the prototype has progressed beyond the initial hackathon idea.
Disclaimer: I was the Social Media Manager of the 2018 Seoul Editors Lab and was asked to write this post to document what happened.
