Over at the Guardian’s blogs, Roy Greenslade notes the Korea Online Newspaper Association’s war on the portal sites:
Here’s an extraordinary development. Korean newspapers have decided to impose a seven-day restriction on web portals that promote their news content. It means that, after a week, net users won’t be able to search for news through the portal sites. Instead, they must visit each individual newspaper’s online site to find a specific article.
That measure takes effect from July 1.
Frankly, I can understand how papers might demand that headlines link to the newspapers’ websites ala Google. Sure, that might cut down on the netizen commentary some and hurt the community atmosphere of a portal site like Naver.com, but seeing how it’s the papers doing the hard work of actually producing the news, outbound links seem perfectly reasonable, IMHO.
But a week limit on news searches? I’ll have to visit the website of each and every newspaper to run archive searches? Absolutely ridiculous. I’d go as far as to say a national shame — in the world’s most wired nation, news searches are about to regress to the pre-Internet days.
9 Comments
Tsk, tsk, as a Korea maven, you should know that this is just “localization” Korean style - just one example of the ways in which modern technology and culture are dumbed down to preserve uri nara (for the benefit of the relatively small number of people who actually are included in the uri - as distince from the mass of the Korean population who suffer from a degree of false consciousness on the subject that would make Marx, Engels, Troysky, Gramsci, Althusser and all their contemporary epigoni synchronously spin in gumsmacked wonder.)
Additionally, at least one of the English dailies — the Korea Times — has adopted a URL-free system in order to stymie hyperlinks. You can’t e-mail a link to a Korea Times article any more, because there are no direct URLs.
Brendon:
??? I don’t have any problem sending email links to Times (or Herald articles). Is it that alternative Mac universe you inhabit?
They must have done something after I wrote them to complain. I don’t visit the site that much.
“as distince from the mass of the Korean population who suffer from a degree of false consciousness on the subject that would make Marx, Engels, Troysky, Gramsci, Althusser and all their contemporary epigoni synchronously spin in gumsmacked wonder”
Trying to emulate the writing style of your literary idol Carole Cameron Shaw?
The Times link problem ain’t a Mac thing. I’ve had trouble, too.
Yeah, I thought I’d try it out. I’m just a nattering nabob of negativism.
This must be more of this “Korean logic” that I don’t seem able to comprehend at my level of intelligence.
The world doesn’t know anything about us (Koreans).
The world doesn’t recognize us (Koreans)for our accomplishments.
The world makes errors in regards to our (Korean) history.
We (Koreans) will correct this by severely restricting access to all current information about Korea.
Can anyone explain this “logic” too me?
I think the biggest shortcomings of online culture in Korea are that it is highly commercialized (nothing like Craigslist) and that it is Balkanized.
I’m not going to waste time looking for the URLs, but at one point the Blue House set up a presidential blog. Not on the Blue House site, mind you, but one each at three different portals or blog services, I believe Naver, Daum, and Cyworld. Why? Because thats what it thought had to be done to reach people in their insular and incestuous little internet communities.
Back when I used an email address I had based on my “oranckay.net” domain and when that was on my business card (which had only my name and email), people would sometimes say they’d never seen that service (portal) or company (thinking it was my employer) before. It was only a few years ago when everyone seemed to have their own personal domains (www…. pe.kr), but nowadays few seem to remember that not everyone’s point of departure on the www is owned by a big corporation. (No, oranckay is not against big corporations.)
I think this move by the papers is going to hurt them, but I also think most netizens are not going to care as long as they find the info they want with articles from the papers that keep with the portals. And the papers that don’t pull out of Daum and Naver are going to get a lot more attention now.
I’m not sure how many ppl will care, but I’ve found that especially for obscure stories and info, the best place to look is at Google Korea News (news.google.co.kr). I have found valuable content from tiny local sites in Korea and Korean language news sites overseas. Aside from maybe a few big provincial papers like Busan Ilbo, Korea’s portals have little that isn’t based in the greater capital region. News sites in Korean outside Korea often have some good gems. The North American edition of the Han’guk Ilbo recently had a full page interview with Victor Cha, and when it comes to some subjects (gyopos in general, Korean language education, what RMH says to embarrass himself while in LA), these sites are far richer in terms of content. Their own search functions are pathetic, so I use google news when I need them.
I’ve read that some Korean newspapers plan to take action against Google for including their stories in Google News, with which, unlike Naver and Daum, they have no agreement in place.
It certainly will be inconvenient if these newspapers restrict Naver searchability of their stories to the past seven days.