The 主播大秀 News Korean team in Singapore covering the Trump-Kim summit
If your view of the world were shaped by the North Korean newspapers - they are available online, and I look at them every day - Kim Jong-un would certainly be at its centre.
It would be a world as the leadership of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea wants to see it. It’s the world they present to their people.
主播大秀 News Korean works to reach them, as well as people in South Korea, to provide a balanced view of the world and international perspective on developments in their countries and the wider region.
These are two very different target audiences.
Judging by the stories of North Korean defectors, people there have a huge hunger for such information. In a country where this, as well as movement of the people, is strictly controlled, there is a demand for independent news.
To get hold of such news people go to great lengths, sometimes taking shortwave radios to remote places to listen to foreign broadcasts, which are illegal in North Korea. They also tamper with their radios to tune into broadcasts other than the pre-fixed government channels.
It is not our job to tell them what is ‘bad’ or ‘good’, and we don’t have any political agenda.
Our daily 20-minute shortwave broadcasts to North Korea started on 25 September 2017, and are structured to meet the needs of this audience, from serious, hard news explainers to quirky stories, to ones we describe as ‘inspire me’ human interest ones, to practical information including weather forecasts.
South Koreans call their language Hangugeo, while North Koreans call it Chos艔n艔. There are other differences, including Western borrowings in South Korean such as hamburger, coke, and cider, and names of countries differ too.
In our radio broadcasts we explain the concepts of, for instance, drones, or Google, Twitter, artificial intelligence, Christmas, the United Nations, and McDonalds.
The last 10 minutes of each broadcast includes 主播大秀 Learning English content. The programme airs at half past midnight local time and is repeated five times within three hours.
In South Korea, we have brought to the fore subjects that Korean media tend not to talk about, be it race or LGBT. For example, on the subject of LGBT, we got our subjects – parents and their gay children - in front of the camera to tell us what it was like to come out or to have a daughter or son tell them they are gay; the shock, the social condemnation they had to go through as parents; and the love they have for their child. Many of our videos have gone viral in South Korea, with stories written about them in the press and on television.
As to the stories of North Korea, they range from a moving interview with a defector, pleading for the safety of the family who were caught while attempting to defect, to a fun video about silly questions North Korean defectors get asked.
We conducted high-profile interviews, with Ban Ki-moon, former UN Secretary-General, and Song Sang-hyun, former President of the International Criminal Court, and contributed significantly to the wider 主播大秀 coverage of the .
Looking ahead, we are planning to launch a YouTube channel to help us further expand our social media presence. But our biggest aspiration is to produce more resonant, in-depth reports about North Korea, exclusive content that would stand out in the region and, via the wider 主播大秀 News operation, around the world.
Even more importantly, we want this content to reach North Koreans.
The 主播大秀 World Service expansion comes thanks to a funding boost of £289m from the UK Government.