About

Welcome to NKnews.org – A comprehensive North Korea related news aggregation and information source, designed for professionals, academics and students working in the area.

North Korea is well known to be an information black-hole.  Mainstream reporting focuses nearly exclusively on the DPRK’s external visage: its nuclear program, chronic food-shortages and human rights system.  However, beyond the headlines there are dozens of other stories being written daily – and on a wide range of issues.

New technologies enable those within North Korea to report on developments from a unique perspective – and with unprecedented capacity, giving outsiders a window into the country unimaginable just a few years ago.  Moving with the times, Pyongyang’s official news outlets recently increased their output significantly – with articles and coverage often providing telling insights into both the regime and people of the DPRK.   And as blogging becomes ever-common, an increasingly wide-range of analysts, academics and armchair commentators are publishing on North Korea – often with perspectives and insights that challenge the think-tank orthodoxy of Washington DC.

Keeping up with all that is published on North Korea is a difficult task, but an increasingly important one.  Seemingly unimportant developments can add important nuance to the bigger picture.  Headline ‘news’ in the mainstream press can be exposed as nothing more than media hysteria.  Cross-referencing of defector stories can add important credibility or illegitimacy to their reporting.

NK News aims to keep visitors au fait with developments in North Korea through four primary ways:

1. Our expert team hand-scours the net each day for English language North Korea related stories and analysis, aggregating the results by category on the website and through the email subscription service.
2. Of all the aggregated materials, NK News highlights “must-read” pieces that might otherwise pass readers by.
3. With the cooperation of a range of outside contributors, NK News regularly produces uniqueand exclusive North Korea related content – in-country reports, blog articles, event & conference reports, travelogues and editorial analysis.
4. NK News provides translations of foreign-language materials worthy of view outside of their target audience.

How Does It Work?

NK News primarily outputs information through the posting of clippings and links on the website and in the daily mailing list service.  While RSS feeds, Google News Alerts and other aggregation techniques could provide readers with the basics of daily North Korea news, their automation systems often provide a large degree of repetitive or irrelevant material.  In addition, many key blogs and news sources are actually ignored by Google’s news crawlers, meaning an incomplete picture very often results.

To provide the most concise and useful presentation of North Korea related news and information, NK News is run manually by a team of knowledgeable volunteers. Each day, we scan the widest range of news sources, blogs, academic institutions and video sites to provide the most comprehensive package of news and analysis possible.  In addition, event and conference listings, job opportunities and academic publications are also presented, as and when they surface.   All content is categorized and tagged appropriately so that visitors can navigate quickly to items that are of interest to their particular field. In respect of copyright, NK News only provides a clippings service – for full materials please click on the relevant links.

Users of the site can keep up to date with output either by signing up to the free email subscription service, or checking the homepage each day.

Why?

While conducting research for an MA thesis on North Korea’s nuclear weapons program, I noticed the lack of a central repository that brought together DPRK-specific news and information in any comprehensive manner.   Having helped produced an information aggregation product called the “Disarmament Digest” for the United Nations in 2008, I then thought of how useful it might be to provide interested groups with a similar service.  Thus in March 2010, the NK News project was born – initially in an email only format and with a membership that could be counted on just one hand.  One month later I ported the project onto the web and started promoting the service to friends and colleagues in Washington DC, London and Beijing.  The same month I started writing my own analysis of events for the site, also inviting guest contributions from site visitors.  Less than a year on, the mailing list has now grown to over 500 members, with roughly the same number visiting the site every day.

The rapid growth of the website, without any advertising, has been surprising– it would seem the service is filling a much needed void.  Also of surprise has been the number of contributors, guest-writers and volunteers that have come on board to help build the service into what it is today.   I hope that by providing access to as diverse a range of North Korea related news and information, academics, students and professionals visiting the site will be able to better judge and understand the North Korea issue.

Unfortunately, the growth of the site has not been without problems, for as traffic has increased, so to have the related hosting and mailing list costs.  And as an independent project that increases in scope week-by-week, it is becoming increasingly difficult to dedicate the time that the project well and truly deserves.    That being said, the project will continue as long as it remains feasible.  And if you appreciate our work, I encourage you to make a donation here.

Tad Farrell, March 2011