[THE INVESTOR] When Choi Sun-kyung, a 29-year-old office worker, hops on the subway to go to work, she immediately starts scrolling her smartphone.

After responding to all the KakaoTalk messages she received overnight, she clicks the bright green app of Naver, Korea’s largest portal site. 


First, she skims the five headlines on the front page to see if any story catches her attention. Today, she reads a story on high youth unemployment rate and ongoing threats from North Korea. She then clicks on the entertainment tab to read reviews of her favorite dramas or see pictures of celebrity’s latest fashion style.

After 15 minutes of news clicking and reading on Naver, she arrives at her stop.

“It’s convenient,” she said. “I don’t have to go to all these different news sites to read stories but pick whatever is on Naver,” she said.

Choi is not the only one who reads news on portal sites.

About 70 percent of Korean people access news through portal sites according to Digital News Report 2016, published by Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism.

Among the Web portals, Naver -- which started out as a search engine in 1999 -- is undoubtedly the market leader.

On any given day, Naver News, the portal’s news site, accounts for a whopping 40 percent of all the Web traffic generated by news and media sites here, according to data retrieved from Rankey.com, a site that specializes in the analysis and ranking of websites. Daum News, the news service of another major portal, Daum, makes up about 20 percent. The rest is split between 2,729 small and big news outlets.

It’s not just the numbers. Now more and more people view Naver as a news medium on its own.

According to a 2015 survey by the Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism, Naver ranked as the No. 1 news outlet in terms of influence in forming public opinion. State-run broadcaster KBS ranked second, followed by Chosun Ilbo, Korea’s largest newspaper by circulation.

Naver says it is not a media outlet because it doesn’t produce news, but is a news deliverer.

Yet the impact the portal has on users in forming public opinion and on news websites -- that are heavily dependent on portals to generate Web traffic -- is very significant, and in turn, giving Naver the weight and influence equivalent to a media outlet, or maybe more.

Naver’s rise to power

Experts say Naver’s rise is on the back of local news outlets, and the lack thereof.

Local news outlets that thrived in the print era failed to publish reliable and interesting content today, diverting people’s attention in the ever-changing online era.

Only 22 percent of Korean people answered that they can trust news in Korea, ranking bottom among 26 major countries around the world, according to the study by Reuters. In the same report, recognition of news brands was very low among Korean users, as they rarely care for brands when they read news online.

“In other countries, people also read news through portal sites such as Yahoo or social media Facebook. But what’s different in Korea is that newspaper websites have failed to attract people’s attention, leading Naver to become a core news carrier,” Kim Seong-cheol, a media professor from Korea University, told The Investor.

“Newspaper companies are small. So if these companies had combined forces to develop a new model or maybe an app together, people would have taken interest in them,” Kim said. “If news sites produce good, reliable news content, people will go to their websites.”

Another factor behind Naver’s success, according to industry insiders, is its “trending keywords” function.

On the website, Naver displays the most frequently searched keywords or topics in the past hour -- six times a day -- and another section dedicated to post keywords that are trending in real-time.

Many users make use of this function to see what they need to know at that very moment.

Naver lets the users hang out inside their portal to read news, post comments and communicate with each other, serving as another media outlet.

“I get curious when certain keywords pop up on Naver’s front page,” a frequent user Yoo Je-hong, 30, said. “So I click them to see what everyone is talking about because I don’t want to miss out. When I search the keyword, a long list of articles from different outlets appear. I usually pick the first one I see or the one with an interesting headline.”

The trending keyword may be beneficial for users to quench their thirst for “hot news” instantly, but for media outlets, it has taken a heavy toll.

When a keyword is trending, news outlets simultaneously churn out the same articles at a record speed, changing only word orders and titles. Writers shove as many keywords onto a story as physically possible, sometimes to the point that the keywords are irrelevant to each other -- known in Korea as “abusing” -- with the sole purpose of enticing readers to click.

Keyword stuffing hurts the news outlet’s quality of journalism. But more so, it leads to a terrible user experience as an unnecessary amount of “abusive” articles ultimately cover up the stories that really matter, experts say.

Delivering impartial news?

In response to the public fury over portals tolerating “abusive” news and other clickbait, Naver and Kakao, the operator of portal Daum, last year together formed a Committee for the Evaluation of News Partnership, an independent organization that screens news. Formed by a panel of experts in media and journalism, the committee draws guidelines to decide which stories and providers are eligible to appear on portals.

Since the committee began reviewing and also penalizing media outlets on March 1, the number of “abusive” articles declined dramatically, according to data revealed by the committee.

However, partiality is an ongoing matter.

There has been a heated debate over Naver and other local portals that they are biased, selecting news based on the editors or the company’s political preferences.

However, Naver denies the claim. It operates an independent committee that evaluates the fairness and accuracy of news selection that goes on the site. It also makes selections and arrangements of the news site public every minute. The records can be found on the website.

Naver delivers around 30,000 stories each day from its partnering news outlets, of them about 100 outlets that get paid for their content and 350 outlets don’t.

So, how is news selected?

It’s a combination of technology and human judgment, Naver says.

“Because we receive more than 30,000 stories each day, people cannot sort out all the articles,” a PR representative of Naver said. “So first the news is organized according to an algorithm, and then the editorial team makes the final selection based on the set guidelines,” he said adding that’s how Yahoo, Twitter, Apple and Snapchat work.

By Ahn Sung-mi (sahn@heraldcorp.com)