South Korea
Across all age groups, news consumption via online portals is declining, but growing rapidly on video platforms, especially short-form content. As media outlets begin to integrate AI more fully into their operations, the AI Act coming into force and the relaunch of Naver’s News Partnership Committee suggest that the South Korean news industry has entered a period of structural transformation.
The Framework Act on the Development of Artificial Intelligence and the Creation of a Foundation for Trust (the AI Act), which took effect in January 2026, marked a significant institutional shift in the South Korean media landscape. The law mandates labelling for generative AI outputs and establishes measures to ensure transparency and safety. As AI is increasingly used across the news production and distribution process, from summarisation and automated editing to image and video generation and recommendation systems, the law stipulates that users must be able to distinguish between journalist-authored and AI-generated content. Accountability and transparency are especially important for sensitive topics such as elections, natural disasters, criminal cases, and social conflict. However, concerns remain over certain issues such as labelling requirements, the scope of what the law describes as ‘high-impact AI’, and details of accountability for news and other content. Moreover, some worry that if implementation leans too heavily towards promotion of AI sector development, protections for copyright and user trust may prove insufficient, particularly in journalism.
At the same time, South Korea’s media landscape is being shaped by both the political prominence of ‘Sovereign AI’ and the practical adoption of AI in newsrooms. In August 2025, the government launched a Sovereign AI policy, centred on a ‘National AI foundation model’ project, a strategic move to operate South Korea-specific data and infrastructure domestically. For the news industry, however, copyright protection and compensation mechanisms for news content used in AI training remain unsettled. Media companies are closely watching and contributing to sovereign AI policy development while continuing to deploy AI in practice.
In the broadcasting sector, two issues have come to the fore: universal viewing rights for major events and public support for local media. JTBC’s exclusive rights to the 2026 Milan-Cortina Winter Olympics, and the subsequent breakdown of resale negotiations with the three terrestrial broadcasters, reignited controversy over whether events of national importance should be concentrated in the hands of a single distributor. Simultaneously, the survival of local broadcasters is under threat. The Regional Broadcasting Association protested against recent budget cuts, arguing that such funding is a necessary public investment to uphold residents’ right to know and maintain the regional public sphere. Funding challenges are further intensifying as broadcast advertising revenue continues to decline. Taken together, the sector faces a structural shift as major events move to platforms and pay TV, while struggling to secure enough funding to fulfil its public mandate.
In early 2026, the governance framework for news distribution on internet portals was overhauled. Given Naver’s very significant role in news consumption, whether a media outlet is admitted to a portal directly affects its traffic, influence, and advertising revenue. The review system that determines which media outlets can be carried by portals has long functioned as one of the key institutions in South Korea’s news ecosystem. Naver’s News Partnership Evaluation Committee, launched in 2015, suspended its activities in 2023 due to controversies over alleged political bias and fairness, creating an institutional vacuum in both new-entry evaluations and the oversight of problematic outlets. In February, Naver launched a newly restructured News Partnership Committee. By emphasising procedural legitimacy and fairness in both partnership reviews and operational evaluation, it seeks to strengthen the reliability and accountability of news distribution while managing low-quality content such as clickbait and advertorials.
Portal-based news consumption is gradually declining. The 2025 Media Users in Korea Report shows that portal use has fallen each year since 20211, while news consumption on online video platforms, especially of short-form content, more than doubled year-on-year. These formats are not only slowing the long-term decline in overall news consumption but also increasing total news use. This reflects a rapid shift from reading to watching and points to significant change in the channels and formats through which users access news. News consumption of influencer content on YouTube is growing quickly, raising concerns for some about information reliability.
Hyun-Woo Lee, Chang-Young Jeon, and Soeun Yang
Senior Researchers, Korea Press Foundation
In the online survey we ask respondents which news brands they have used to access news in the last week. These figures are based on respondents’ recall of the news sources they have used, and should be understood as survey-based measures of weekly brand reach for news.
They are not the same as web analytics, audience ratings, or other audience measurement systems (such as BARB for television in the UK). Those approaches use different methods and may measure different things. Our figures are based on what respondents tell us in an online survey about which brands they have used for news in the past week.
It is also important to note that we ask specifically about use for news. Some multi-genre broadcasters, newspapers, or other providers offer content beyond news, and the figures in our report should not be interpreted as measuring the overall audience reach for these media organisations. They refer only to respondents who say they used that brand to access news.
How do you ask about offline and online news reach?
We ask about offline and online reach separately. First, we ask respondents which brands they have used to access news offline in the last week, via TV, radio, print, and other traditional media. Then we ask which brands they have used to access news online in the last week, via websites, apps, social media, and other forms of internet access.
The questions as asked in the survey are:
Which of the following brands have you used to access news offline in the last week (via TV, radio, print, and other traditional media)? Please select all that apply.
Which of the following brands have you used to access news online in the last week (via websites, apps, social media, and other forms of Internet access)? Please select all that apply.
Respondents can select more than one brand in each question. For that reason, the figures do not add up to 100%. They show the proportion of respondents who say they used each brand for news in the last week.
How do you present the weekly news reach data in the report?
On each country or market page, we present the most widely used brands in two charts: one for offline news reach and one for online news reach. The offline chart covers use via TV, radio, print, and other traditional media. The online chart covers use via websites, apps, social media, and other internet-based forms of access.
The figures shown are weekly news reach: the percentage of respondents who say they used that brand for news at least once in the last week.
These figures are useful for comparing the relative news reach of different brands within each market, and for understanding how news use is distributed across offline and online sources. However, they should not be treated as market shares or measures of total time spent with a brand.
How do you choose which brands to ask about?
The brand selection is a strategic sample and not a comprehensive list of all news providers in each market. We consult with country or market experts, review prior years’ Digital News Report data, and draw on other data sources to identify the most widely used brands for news across traditional and online channels.
In some cases, where a news provider operates a number of related news brands, we aggregate these under a single heading. For example, in the UK, reach for the BBC may include use of several BBC news services across different platforms. This is done to give a clearer sense of the overall reach of major news providers, but it means that figures may not always refer to a single programme, website, app, newspaper, or channel.
Because of survey length limitations, we can only ask about a limited number of brands in each market. The charts should not be treated as exhaustive lists of every brand used for news in that market. Due to space limitations, reach charts show up to 16 of the most used brands, though we ask about more in each survey.
How should the offline and online figures be interpreted?
A respondent may use the same brand both offline and online, and may also use several different brands in the same week. For this reason, the offline and online figures should not be added together to calculate a total audience. They are best read as separate indicators of how far particular brands reach people through different forms of access.
As with other survey-based findings, small differences should be interpreted with caution. We are careful not to claim that one brand reaches more people than another, or that a brand’s reach has changed, unless the differences are large enough to be meaningful. Any year on year change of 2 percentage points or lower is not considered statistically significant.
Changing media
Online portals such as Naver are the most widely used source of news, followed by television, social media, and print. Video and short-form usage is rising, and AI chatbot news consumption is notably high.
Pay for online news
19%
(-)
Avoid the news sometimes/often
29%
(-2)
Trust in news overall
30%
(-1)
Global average: 37%
Trust in news remains largely stable at 30%. Trust in major media outlets increased this year; broadcasters (KBS, SBS, MBC, Channel A) and newspapers (Hankyoreh, Kyunghyang, Joongang, Dong-A) all saw gains. Broadcasters, led by MBC (60%), JTBC (59%), SBS (56%), YTN (54%), and KBS (53%), remain more trusted than newspapers.
We ask each respondent to rate a number of popular brands (usually 15 in each country) according to how trustworthy they think each brand’s news output is. We do this on a 0-10 scale, where a score of 0 means that the respondent does not see the brand as trustworthy at all and 10 means that they see the brand as completely trustworthy – with 5 meaning ‘neither trustworthy or untrustworthy’. There is an option for those who have not heard of any particular brand to ensure that scores are based only on responses from people who are familiar with each brand.
When we come to report these scores, we add up the proportion of respondents that give a score between 6-10 and mark this as ‘trust’. We also add up the proportion that give a brand a score between 0-4 and mark this as ‘don’t trust’.
The question as asked in the survey is…
How trustworthy would you say news from the following brands is? Please use the scale below, where 0 is ‘not at all trustworthy’ and 10 is ‘completely trustworthy’.
As we make explicit throughout the report, including next to tables presenting brand-level trust findings, whether respondents consider a brand trustworthy or not is their subjective judgement. The percentage figures shown are aggregates of people’s personal opinions, they are not an objective assessment of underlying trustworthiness. We leave it to each respondent to form an opinion on whether they trust someone or something, and we field the question because we consider the resulting data to be important.
How do you present the trust data in the report?
We present the data in an alphabetised table. In the past, we presented this data as a stacked bar chart, but this led some to treat the chart as a list of the most and least trusted news brands in a given market, despite our explicit explanation this was not what the tables showed.
We present the data in a way that avoids giving small differences the appearance of great importance. In cases where there is around two percentage points difference or less between the brands, we cannot say for sure that one brand is more trusted than another. We are careful not to try to claim that one brand is more trusted than another or that trust scores have changed unless those changes are statistically significant.
Due to survey length limitations, it is important to note that we only ask about 15 of the most widely used brands. It is very likely that there are brands with lower (and higher) trust scores that we do not ask about. For that reason, we cannot say that any brand is the least (or most) trusted overall. Next to each chart we are careful to say: “Only the below brands were included in the survey. It should not be treated as a list of the most or least trusted brands as it is not exhaustive.”
How do you choose which brands to ask about?
We consult with country or market experts, draw on prior years’ Digital News Report data and other data sources to determine the most widely used brands (across traditional and online channels) when it comes to news. We also try to include ‘local newspapers’ or ‘local television’ as catch-all titles as we recognise their impact is considerable in most markets.
How representative is this 48-market survey?
The Digital News Report survey is based on an online poll but the methodology selects participants to be as representative of national populations as possible. Samples are assembled using representative quotas for age, gender, and region in every market and data is weighted to targets based on census/industry accepted data. The full methodology can be found here.
How do you try to contextualise the findings to ensure that trust scores are not taken out of context or misinterpreted?
Trust is one of a number of measures we track, including consumption of different sources, device usage, social media use, and much more. We aim to maintain consistency in our measurements year-on-year so that ratings of trust, levels of news consumption, and more, can be contextualised.
Country data is accompanied by an 800-word commentary from a media expert that aims to set the data in a wider context. We write a short commentary on the trust scores where appropriate, noting any statistically relevant changes.
RSF World Press Freedom Index
47/180
Score 69.12
Measure of press freedom from NGO Reporters Without Borders based on expert assessment. More at rsf.org
