Compiled with the help of Ahran Park & So-Eun Lee, Senior Researchers, Media Research Center, Korea Press Foundation.

Home-grown portals have become the leading destination for news consumers in South Korea in recent years, eroding the business models of traditional publishers. Now online video and podcasts are beginning to disrupt the broadcast sector.

Top Brands

Changing Media

Audiences for traditional TV news have started to dip, partly due to more competition from long- and short-form video online. YouTube is being increasingly used for news (+7) and this partly explains the surge in social media use. Readership of newspapers is significantly down since 2016 and is likely to be hit further in the aftermath of COVID-19.

Trust

Trust in the news in South Korea is consistently amongst the lowest in our survey, though confidence in individual news brands is much higher. TV news brands such as JTBC, MBC, and YTN tend to be trusted most, with popular newspapers least trusted in general – even if they are often better trusted by those that use the brands regularly.