Category: journalism (Page 1 of 2)

Music’s changing soundscape in Korea

February 16, 2014 / Mark / 0 Comments

I was poking around some old files the other day, when I came across an article I wrote for Billboard nearly a decade ago about MP3 players in Korea. The magazine ended up merging it with a similar story by Steve McClure about the Japanese MP3 player market, but most of my stuff made it into the published version.

Given the huge success of Samsung smartphones and other Korean devices around the world, not to mention the rise of Apple products in Korea, I thought people might be amused to read it:

The picture shows a model taking a bite out of an apple. It is part of an advertising campaign to promote the latest iriver-brand digital music player, the H10, by South Korean audio company ReignCom. The tag line is “Sweeter one.”

This ad illustrates the tough fight Apple Computer faces in Southeast Asia’s digital portable audio market.

Japanese and South Korean electronics companies are meeting the challenge posed by the extraordinary popularity of Apple’s iPod–in their home markets and elsewhere–with a new generation of portable players.

<snip>

In South Korea, the primacy of flash-memory digital music players made it one of the few territories in the world where the iPod did not dominate, until this year. At its peak, in 2003, ReignCom claimed to have more than 50% of the South Korean portable-music-player market.

But like other South Korean electronics firms, ReignCom saw its market share slide when the low-priced iPod shuffle arrived.

Now these firms are slashing prices and adding features to their portable players to win back consumers.

ReignCom went so far as to run high-profile ads in local newspapers March 1–Korean Independence Day–calling for a “patriotic war” against the iPod.

“Our overall branding strategy is based on product innovation,” iriver director of brand marketing Hanna Young says. The H10 is still about $30 more expensive than the iPod mini, but it has a built-in FM tuner, color screen, voice recorder and digital-photo slide-show capability.

Joining the fray is South Korean heavyweight Samsung Electronics, which has declared its ambition to be the world’s top seller of portable music players by 2007. Samsung sold 1.7 million MP3 players worldwide in 2004 and is aiming for 5 million this year.

The whole story is here.

Strangely, though, Billboard took out my original lede, which mentioned Reigncom’s ad campaign that used porn actress Jenna Jameson. Maybe they were shy?

Anyhow, walking around Seoul these days, you can’t help but notice all the music stores. However, unlike in the 1990s, when they all sold, you know, music, now music stores mostly sell headphones and DJ equipment. So I guess young people are still spending as much as ever on the music they love, but they’re just spending it in totally different areas — in the tech instead of the content.

Between the Lines: Editorial Cartoons — Daebak

January 7, 2014 / Mark / 2 Comments

One of the more difficult parts of the day at my newspaper is working on the editorial cartoons. For one thing, Korean editorial cartoons tend to be somewhat more oblique than the cartoons in the West. They also can contain a lot of information that is difficult to convey quickly to a non-Korea expert. And language issues — puns, nuance, etc. — make getting a usable translation very difficult. And, to make things just that much harder, the cartoon tends to come to us late in the evening, when deadlines are rushing up loudly and madly like the edge of a waterfall.

Which leads me to the point of this post, today’s editorial cartoon in the Korea JoongAng Daily:

In the original cartoon, President Park says “대박” (Daebak), or “Jackpot!,” as it has been most commonly translated (including in our lead story).

In response, the DP Chairman Kim Han-gill says “소박 맞았다” (Sobak majassda). Sobak being the opposite of Daebak. The idea being, the president is bragging she’s a winner, while Kim complains he’s a loser (because President Park did not mention anything about appointing a special prosecutor to investigate the National Intelligence Service).

But how to express that in a cartoon? “I’m a winner” and “I’m a loser” is way too literal and dull. “Jackpot” is a fun word, but what would Kim say in response? I was toying with “I got jacked”, but that just wasn’t funny and too open to misinterpretation. In the end, we ran out of time and went with “I did it” and “You did me in,” in a vague attempt at parallelism.

Sadly, about two hours later, as I was relaxing at home, I finally thought of the right response for Mr. Kim.

President Park: “Jackpot!”
Kim: “Busted…”

Ah well. Better luck next time. Because in the bottomless well that is journalism, there is always a next time.

Tuesday Morning Links

October 15, 2013 / Mark / 0 Comments

For the Korea JoongAng Daily’s 13-year anniversary issue — and to mark the 60-year anniversary of the end of the Korean War — I wrote an overview of the history of Korean movies. You probably know the broad strokes of this story already … However, I was lucky enough to get some wonderful details from actor Ahn Sung-ki, producer Jonathan Kim, and the big boss of CJ Entertainment Miky Lee. Huge thanks to all of them for taking the time to talk to me. (Korea JoongAng Daily)
Interesting article on Lee Shin-young, who is reportedly the first female horse trainer in Asia. (Korea JoongAng Daily)
Unfortunately, one big detail in the previous story was wrong — Lee Shin-young was not Korea’s first female jockey. That honor goes to Lee Ok Rae, who rode back in 1975 (Horse Racing in Korea blog)
Google vs. Korean government over future of Internet freedom in Korea (New York Times)
Something funny about Korea complaining about Chinese smokers. (Korea JoongAng Daily)
Hard to believe, but I can still remember a time when smoking was allowed on airplanes on domestic flights in North America. But one by one, countries are slowly turning against the (smelly) (and sublime) habit.
Today, the International Herald Tribune is no more. It rebrands as the International New York Times. INYT? Doesn’t exactly scan well, does it? As my first article for the IHT was nearly 10 years ago, I’m a bit sad about the change. For me, when I think of the Herald Tribune, I am always reminded of that scene from Breathless, when we first meet the Jean Seberg character:

Citations and Celebrations

October 1, 2012 / Mark / 2 Comments

It’s been a good couple of days for people who like to read my ramblings about Korea (admittedly a rather small sub-section of humanity). First, I was quoted a fair bit in an article in the Scotland Sunday Herald about K-pop. And now the latest New Yorker, as John Seabrook’s feature article about K-pop, “Factory Girls,” references Pop Goes Korea a whole bunch — sadly, though, Seabrook’s story is behind a pay wall. (UPDATE: I nearly forgot, I also was quoted in an Ad Age article about the marketability of Psy and “Gangnam Style”*).

“Factory Girls” was interesting, as I got to experience the famed New Yorker fact-checking regime. Plenty of calls and emails asking about all sorts of K-pop details, sometimes basic facts, but other times more interpretive. They were nice enough to have uncovered a couple of errors from my chapter on Lee Sooman … in part because there is so much more information from the 1980s and 1990s online now than when I wrote the book. Luckily, none of the errors were crucial to my book — mostly they were details (like the number of times one K-pop star was arrested for drug use), the kind of things I hope to clean up should the book ever get another edition.

Anyhow, if you are interested the New Yorker’s fact checking culture, John McPhee’s article “Checkpoints” is also paywalled, but you can read it for free here.

* (How scary is it that when Anita Chang Beattie filed her story late last week, “Gangnam Style” had 283 million Youtube hits, and already it is at 335 million?)

* * *

In other news, Park Jihyun and Gord Sellar’s short film, “The Music of Jo Hyeja,” just won the Audience Pick Award at the HP Lovecraft Film Festival in Los Angeles. “The Music of Jo Hyeja” is a spooky, atmospheric short film that re-tells Lovecraft’s story “The Music of Erich Zann.” It looks great and features music by Jambinai, so how can you go wrong? Hopefully it will come to a film festival near you before too long.

Why News Media Fail on Politics

September 4, 2012 / Mark / 0 Comments

Sasha Issenberg just wrote a rather wrong-headed article in the New York Times (that’s getting a lot of coverage) on why news media fails to cover elections and the political process adequately. Issenberg’s point seems to be that the chess-masters that are the press cannot hope to understand the chess-grandmasters that are the political strategists. Not to put too fine a point on it, but “bullshit.”

1) Many of the best political strategists move in and out of the media (mostly TV) all the time. The media is plenty aware of how campaigns work.

2) Voter identification and persuasion is not that different. The tools may change, but the ideas are still the same. And could there be a more vacuous statement than this:

Microtargeting was at once less directly influential, and more fundamentally disruptive, than these analyses suggested.

So, microtargetting is less important and more important. Brilliant.

3) The failings of the media are pretty much the same as they’ve ever been. The needs and requirements of journalists does not intersect perfectly with campaigns — yes, that makes journalists susceptible to manipulation … but it also makes campaigns vulnerable to getting screwed by journalists.

4) What has changed with the media is the same thing that’s changed in all areas of the news — sports coverage, entertainment, tech, etc. There’s more noise than ever to sift through, and editors are acutely aware of what people are actually reading. The news Beast always needs to be fed, faster than ever (there are no more news weeklies, everything is instant now) and you cannot make news out of something that has not changed.

Also worth remembering:

5) Everything on TV is always stupid.

Billboard Overboard

March 5, 2012 / Mark / 0 Comments

I can’t say I’m very surprised by the latest reports of trouble at Billboard magazine. Louis Hau (a big Korea booster who in fact preceded me in Korea with Billboard and several publications, although we never met) is out, along with publisher Lisa Howard and several top editors. Billboard Pro, the DIY-indie sub site, has been closed. Although for me, the most surprising thing is probably that the industry ~~anachronism~~ journal has lasted this long without the brutal bloodletting that The Hollywood Reporter has suffered (sure, Billboard suffered, just not as badly). I always liked my editors at THR, at least on the international side of things, even if the magazine was an out-of-date business model. But at Billboard … well, not so much.

The cronyism with the industry that the Billboard editors were supposed to be covering was much deeper and more endemic. It felt like they were constantly trying to turn the clock back to 1998, before that nasty Internet came along and ruined everything.

If there is a major takeaway I hope people have to my writing in general (and today’s story in the International Herald Tribune), it is that the Internet and globalizations have fundamentally changed the power relationship between artists (or “producers”), fans (or “consumers”), and the music industry (“who knows?”). Gatekeeping isn’t what it used to be.

Oh, a bonus chart from Digital Music News about singles sales, just for fun:

This .gif animation mapping changes in music sales over the past 30 years is pretty cool, too.

K-Pop Fun

March 5, 2012 / Mark / 0 Comments

I just had a new story about K-pop — “Bringing K-Pop to the West” — appear in the International Herald Tribune (first page of the business section) and New York Times (last page of the biz section, or so I’ve been told). It is kind of interesting to be running in the business section, instead of my usual Arts & Culture, and interesting to co-write a story with someone. I mean, having written for Billboard and other trade magazines for so long, I am quite familiar with culture business writing; but getting into the IHT‘s business pages felt a bit different. Anyhow, I’m happy with how the story turned out and the feedback it has been getting.

There have been a lot of stories appearing in the Western media asking “What is K-pop?”, but for this story I more wanted to ask “Why now?” Artists from all over the world are constantly trying to break into the American and Western market, and usually they don’t have much to show for it. Even Korean pop labels have tried several times.

I also talk a bit more about my thoughts and music in general over at Korean Indie, if you are interested. But there is so much more to address, especially about how the world’s music and culture markets are changing these days. Hopefully I should have some more stories coming soon talking about globalization and other big trends.

Truth and Journalism

January 14, 2012 / Mark / 0 Comments

One of the big discussions floating around the Internet for the past couple of days has come from the New York Times‘ public editor Arthur Brisbane’s recent column, “Should the Times Be a Truth Vigilante?,” which asks to what extent journalists should just come out and call a liar a liar in their stories. Unsurprisingly, most commentary has mocked Brisbane for asking this, believing it indicates a failing of modern journalism and basic morality that a relatively big-name journalist like Brisbane cannot handle the truth. I guess it is similar to the old Bush-43 spokesman (Karl Rove?) who once talked about “reality-based communities,” saying that the world no longer worked that way and we now create our own realities.

I think people who bash Brisbane are often missing the bigger point. Sure, there are times when public figures say things that are blatantly, obviously false, and they should be called to account But often it is not about fact vs. fiction, but more about “Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?” — “Who guards the guardians?” (or, if you are a nerd like me, “Who watches the Watchmen?”).

As someone who has held more than a few minority opinions in my lifetime (as we all do, I think), I know what it feels like to have an opinion dismissed, simply for being odd or unconventional. And it seems to me that for every clear-cut case of someone lying or offering a self-serving theory to advance themselves, there are many more murky incidents that are not so clear. Sure, you can tell fact from fiction, and you know when something is grey and nuanced. But do you trust the people you work with and others to make the same distinctions so well?

Let’s face it, when people get together, they often get a lot more opinionated and dumber then they are as individuals. People are not all above average. Many of us are dumb — usually dumber in some areas than others, but sometimes just all-round dumb. And a few special people are able to succeed in their professions despite a surplus of dumbness. Laws and other regulations are always enforced by dumb people, or at least by the collective dumbness humanity repeatedly exhibits when it acts in groups.

Which is why I would be very hesitant for journalists to just start add “he lied” to their stories. There is just way too much room for abuse in that sort of policy. Most of the time it is better to present the facts and let readers make up their own minds. People may be dumb, but the average person is not, and a well-written story should point toward the truth naturally. Perhaps what people should be decrying is less the post-modern disintegration of truth and more the decline of good writing (and critical reading skills, but that’s a rant for another time).

K-Pop on Billboard

September 5, 2011 / Mark / 0 Comments

Considering that I wrote about Billboard a couple of times last week, I really should have mentioned that the trade magazine has started to run a K-Pop chart (although I cannot seem to get it to work at the moment).

It’s quite a change from back when I was writing for Billboard. Back around 2003 or 2004 or so, Billboard had a pretty wide variety of little charts from all over the world, including such non-hot spots as Malaysia. There was never much interest in adding Korea to the mix, especially since there was nothing resembling an authoritative, transparent music chart. Most of the TV channels put together their own charts, based on call-ins and a variety of cryptic data. Every so often, not surprisingly, there would be some sort of kickback/payola scandal about a chart, causing a big outcry and shutting down that chart for a time. Things got so bad in 2003 that all the major music charts in the country were taken down.

I always thought it significant that Korea was unable to put together a reliable music chart at the same time music sales were falling off a cliff. It was a telling contrast that the movie industry was booming as movie box office data were getting better and better. Of course, the music industry eventually regrouped and went all-online in Korea, which I guess helped them put together the data for this new chart.

On the other hand, The Hollywood Reporter appears to have stopped running its box office chart for South Korea. That did not last very long. Back when I wrote for THR, I bugged them for years to start including the official box office charts, but never found much interest — even though the information was easily available online, and even though, at its peak, Korea was about the world’s fifth-largest box office. In one of THR’s more recent revamps, it started to include Korea’s movie chart, but I guess it was too much trouble…

Anyhow, it looks like Billboard’s new K-Pop chart has gotten a bit of press. Such as this article at the Globe & Mail, which says “It’s as if disco had a baby with European house music — then weaned it on candy” (thanks to Gusts of Popular Feeling for the pic).

Struggling Writers

August 13, 2011 / Mark / 0 Comments

A generation ago, struggling writers who needed a bit of cash might try porn — fast, trashy writing that was generally artless, but it paid the bills. Today, they have news aggregators — pretty much the same thing.