Ever since 1946, North Korea’s state-run Rodong Sinmun newspaper has been churning out articles on a daily basis, including in an online English-language version since 2012.

And while the monotony of the ruling party’s mouthpiece certainly makes for dry reading, the thousands of articles that it publishes every year offer a goldmine for those willing to look beyond the surface.

Using web-scraping tools and data science methods, the author gathered and analyzed 1,238 headlines from the English-language politics and economy sections of the Rodong Sinmun, spanning from Jan. 1 to Nov. 30, 2023.

What this analysis reveals