We met our student tour guide, Hye Ryung, and her friend who took us to the subway station. Subway stations in Seoul are very pristine clean, very quiet, and very aesthetically pleasing; they are much more formal looking and much more efficient than the stations in the United States. And as we were walking around Seoul, I couldn’t help but notice the intertwined the past, nature, and the bustling city were.
We walked through a park on our way to the Korean Broadcasting Company (KBS) and saw protestors against US beef along the way. They were just setting up some stands and putting up signs when we arrived.
A tour guide took us through KBS and we saw the development of TVs in Korea, the orchestra room, a set-up of the anchor desks, where McKenna and I tried our hand at anchoring the news, a presentation of 3D Korean cartoon and drama shows, and a hallway with holograms of Korean stars in traditional Korean dramas. We got to test out their chroma-key and I tried my hand at delivering the weather, while simultaneously enjoying the blue cape, which allowed me to “disappear”.
We also quickly saw their control room, which looked similar to the ones at CNN and NBC, and their anchor desks. Then we toured their lot and saw the set they use for a talk show, for concerts, which is gorgeous and quite huge and is changed three times a week, and for their music shows, which has free admission and gets people close to their favourite pop stars.
We ate nang myun (cold noodles) for lunch. And the kimchi is ridiculously hot!
On the way back to the subway station, however, the small protest we had seen earlier in the day turned into a medium-sized protest. Korean University student Hye Ryung said the protest was against the high oil prices in the country. The protesters were mainly farmers and drivers, and they were calling on the government to lower oil, along with milk, prices.
Though the cheers were loud, the protest was organized and calm. Some people wore hats that said “Living Rights” and others carried flags and posters, while other protesters sat on the side wearing bandanas of support.
Cheers and jeers were heard from the protestors and Korean music played in the background, but the protest was not out of control. In fact, a sign that it wasn’t were the rows of policemen who were sitting calmly beside them.
This protest only added fuel to the larger beef import crisis involving the government opening up beef trade again with the United States. While government officials argue the beef is safe, many Korean citizens are worried about potential contracting mad cow disease from the meat. College students are also rallying in the beef protest, but their protest purpose is more focused on how President Lee is succumbing to pressure from the American government.
Cultural observation on the subway: people stare at the floor, look at a magazine or stare at their mp3 players instead of glancing around and being loud while talking to others. They seem to take their subway rides very seriously.
We then went to the office of Cho Sun, Korean’s leading newspaper. The traditionally conservative (in Korean, not American, terms) has the highest readership and subscriptions amongst the three national papers. Not only is the newspaper prestigious, it is also leading the way, in both the East and the West, in new media technology for newspapers. The company developed many new electronic gadgets, though many are not yet on the market.
They include an electronic paper, which can be viewed on a LCD monitor, and manipulated just like the CNN computers. Readers can “flip” pages, zoom in on stories, and expand the view of stories.
Cho Sun also created an intelligent newspaper, which allows readers to “tag” their favourite topics and then the server will continuously send articles with those topics to the reader’s personal device, such as a cell phone or PDA. There was also an I-reader. This type of newspaper allows the reader to highlight interesting parts of an article and then add comments, which can only be viewed by the reader and are not added to the article.
The Cho Sun new media lab is amazing, top-quality, and cutting edge. In many ways, East Asia has already developed the system for newspapers to be viewed in the future. Their technology gives the reader greater control over the content and utilizes technology to grab their attention. Cho Sun has designed the new wave of newspaper readership, and American newspapers must play catch up to their better performing Korean counterparts. Cho Sun has a circulation of 2 million, twice the size of the New York Times.
Dinner was held in a Japanese beer restaurant, with the beer being Asahi, a dry, crisp beer. We met with the leaders of Korean journalism, such as two Korean University professors of journalism, the head of the Journalsm School at Korea University, and the Associate Dean of the Journalism School. Since all had been educated at American universities, the traditional Korean ways of greeting, bowing, was thrown out the window and was replaced with hand-shaking. All of the guests were fluent in English, friendly and outgoing, quite the contrary to the traditional Korean citizen.
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