Media Preferences of South Korea's Teenagers

The Korea Times today reports on a survey of middle and high school students by the Korea Press Foundation in September.  The survey showed that Korean teenagers prefer internet portal sites to newspapers for getting news, and trust them more than conventional print media.
When asked which media they are likely to use the most when they become adults, 46 percent selected Internet portals, while 25 percent picked terrestrial television, 12 percent internet news, 7 percent free newspapers distributed at subway stations, and only 5 percent newspapers. When asked to rate the credibility of 30 private and public media organizations, MBC, KBS, Portal Sites and Hangyoreh daily ranked first, second, fourth and fifth respectively.  Netizens ranked third on the measure of reliability, while the Joongang, Chosun and Donga Ilbo newspapers ranked 22nd, 24th and 25th.
Internet portals, online communities, and friends or family dominated the teenagers reported sources of information about this year's candlelight vigils.

Koreans Trust the Internet, Blogs as News Sources

More sense can be made of the current political upheaval in South Korea over importing American beef against the backdrop of a 2006 survey conducted in ten countries for the BBC, Reuters and the American Press Institute's Media Center. What made Korea stand out among the ten countries in this study was the degree of trust shown in the internet as a source of news. Approximately 85% of South Koreans asked said they put a high value on accessing news over the internet, a much higher proportion than in other countries. As shown in the graphic to the left, over a third of Koreans named the internet as their most important source of news. Especially amoung young people, there has been a switch from reliance on television as a news source to the internet. This pattern can be seen in all ten of the countries in the survey, but it is most pronounced in Korea. The survey cites the impact of Korea's advanced communications infrastructure, noting that over 86% of households (that percentage is now well over 90 percent) are online. "The supremacy of TV is in danger of being usurped by the internet. A third of Koreans cite the net as their most important source of news, rivalling the 41% who cite TV. It is also one of the most positive countries about blogs, with 38% trusting them compared to the 10-country average of 25%. " The full poll results can be downloaded in PDF format from the BBC and they contain some interesting glimpses of the new communication environment emerging in South Korea. Seventy-one percent of South Koreans think that government interferes too much with the media, a percentage exceeded only in Nigeria (where 74% hold that view). Seventeen percent of South Koreans named blogs as their most important news source, compared with only 3 percent in the other nine countries surveyed.