Last week Saturday, AAJA-Asia members in Seoul sat with four distinguished media professionals on topics that have become a contested issue during the unfolding of the latest political scandal that toppled the South Korean president – ethics and journalism in South Korea.
The Seoul subchapter of AAJA-Asia jointly organized the event with Korea Exposé (https://koreaexpose.com/), an English-language media that is seeing fast growing fans with its in-depth, nuanced analysis on Korea.
The event was a huge success — a great turnout and most of us stay focused on the discussions that went on for more than two hours on Saturday afternoon without any break. It brought together an unusual mixture of voices across different backgrounds.
We would like to express our very special thanks to the panelists and the moderator for the engaging and nuanced discussions on inner workings of the South Korean and foreign media.
They are;
_the New York Times Seoul bureau chief Choe Sang-hun
_Seoul Shinmun Civil Division Desk Chief Mun So Young
_Inje University Journalism Studies Professor Kim Chang-yong
_Sanghyun Park, Contents Lab Director at Mediati, a Seoul-based media venture investor and incubator
_Moderator: Se-Woong Koo, Managing Editor at Korea Exposé.
We are also thankful for the generous support from Mediati, which offered its event hall and sponsored coffee for all attendants.
Visit Mediati Facebook page here (https://www.facebook.com/mediati.kr/) and Korea Exposé, which is one of the media startups invested by Mediati, here (https://www.facebook.com/KoreaExpose/).
Our special thanks also go to Jun Michael Park who took great pictures of the event and agreed to share them here on the AAJA-Asia blog.
You can see more of Jun’s photos here: https://www.instagram.com/junmichaelpark/
Haeryun Kang, a managing editor at Korea Exposé and Youkyung Lee, an AAJA-Asia member and a business reporter or the Associated Press, offered translation.
Se-Woong, Haeryun, Youkyung and Tae-hoon put their heads together since January to find panel speakers, to develop questions and topics and to work out logistical issues. We thank the local media professionals who offered us their precious advice for the panel.
For the AAJA-Asia Seoul team, this was the first event of the year and a good chance to test the new organizational structure that was implemented to divide up the tasks. It was excellent!
Elaine Ramirez deftly created an online reservation form. Gavin Huang created a nice online banner putting his creative skills into use yet another time — Click here to visit the Facebook event page to check out the banner — Ethics and Journalism in South Korea:Views In and Outside Newsrooms
Social media team Kianna Mckenzie and Nayoung Kang created an event page on Facebook, kept all of us on the same page with excellent communication skills and handled all the inquiries from social media.
Carina Lee, Seoul treasurer, did a perfect job managing income and expenses while regularly checking the bank account to make sure that we are not overbooked (a few days before the event, we were suddenly swarmed by RSVP requests from everywhere!). She effectively created an income statement and finished all the financial transactions just two days after the event.
Brolley Genster, Tae-hoon Lee, Gavin Huang, Ha-young Choi and Eunice Kim offered their time and hands to set up the venues and handle the registration. This event would not have been successful without any of these members and those who are not mentioned here.
The panel discussion were off the record.
If you’d like to learn more about what is going on in South Korean media and ethics, we recommend two excellent essays;
_by Se-Woong
https://koreaexpose.com/ethics-south-korean-journalism-fails/ (in English)
_by Ms. Mun So Young, one of our panelists
http://www.journalist.or.kr/news/article.html?no=40860 (in Korean).