Daily NK

Source profile

Origin:

South Korea

Region:

Asia

Founded:

December 2004

Ownership: Daily NK Co., Ltd., a for-profit joint-stock company registered as an internet newspaper in Seoul in 2005, sharing an address and its leadership with the non-profit Unification Media Group, which heads the consortium it belongs to; Lee Kwang Baek is president of both. Launched in December 2004 by the Network for North Korean Democracy and Human Rights and later spun off. No state or party holds it, and the outlet states it has never been run by defectors, though it employs journalists originally from North Korea.

Funding: Names an American democracy endowment as its biggest donor and discloses the relationship on its own site; also holds United States State Department human rights grants. Sells North Korean market data to research institutions and government agencies, takes reader donations through the affiliated non-profit, and has accepted individual research commissions from South Korean state-funded bodies. No amounts are verifiable.

Focus Areas: North Korean food supply and grain policy, market prices and exchange rates, crackdowns on foreign media and speech, policing, punishment and executions, cross-border trade with China, labour and troop deployments to Russia, and satellite analysis of military, nuclear and chemical sites.

Language:

English, with Korean and Chinese editions; the Japanese edition is run by a separate organisation