nanoomi

By Soorin Kim

There have been two times when I had to live apart from my dad, a veteran journalist in KBS. The first period came when my family was living in Pusan and my dad got promoted to become the director of a nascent media-watch program, “Media Focus,” at the head office of KBS in Seoul. Although we had to live apart, we were all happy about this change. It was an important position in the world of Korean media.

Later, he became the director and founding father of the KBS investigative report unit, and led the team to disclosing a variety of important issues such as exposing the Korean nationals who took medals and were given important positions from Japan during the Japanese colonial period. Several of the team’s investigative reports were awarded by prominent international journalism award such as IRE awards as well as the prominent Korean journalism award, “The Journalist of the Year” award. He was one of the most important and influential journalists in Korea, and the authorities feared him. It was only me who didn’t know that. He was just dad.

Another time I had to live apart from dad came when I was in 8^th grade. The conservative presidential candidate became the president and a lot of unprecedented things started to happen. Some of them were sudden, like the replacing of CEOs of public broadcasting channels like KBS and MBC. Soon, my dad was suddenly downgraded to a regular journalist and sent to the Ulsan KBS department.

Ever since I can remember, my dad wanted me to become a journalist like him. I said no. I knew nothing about being a journalist except for the fact that they deliver news for us. When I said I wanted to be a cartoonist, he asked me if I would like to become an editorial cartoonist. For me, editorial cartoons weren’t beautiful enough. I was just a kid who wanted to live doing what I liked in a quiet world. Read the full story

In a K-pop-heavy round-up of Korean tech/social media blogs:

• Bloter.net has an interview with Joyce Kim, who after a stellar academic career (Cornell, Harvard, law school) decided to ditch her job as a lawyer and start up Soompi.com, a site aimed at making Korean films, soap operas and pop music more accessible to English speakers. The article begins with some observations about how hard it is, language issues aside, for foreigners to access sites offering Korean dramas and K-pop music (Korea’s real-name registration system, Korean sites’ insistence on using Internet Explorer, and the dearth of English-language sites in the US).
  Kim says her site now gets more than 1.2 million hits a month (of whom only 10 percent are Korean) and that Korean pop culture has enormous potential among American youngsters, who Kim reckons view Hollywood as increasingly stale. About the difficulties facing start-ups in Korea, Kim has this to say:

Read the full story