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| Unlike the design of its old news box on its start page, which randomly published the headlines of its news partners, Naver's News Stand allows users to customize the media outlets appearing in their news feed. / Korea Times |
By Kim Tong-hyung
In defending the biggest overhaul of its news section since it went online in 1999, Naver (www.naver.com) speechified about purging the Internet of flash and trash headlines.
Mission accomplished so far. A week into its existence, News Stand has been successfully converting headlines screaming ''Shocking,'' ''Appalling'' and ''Oh My God'' into waves of photos of scantily-clad women.
Unlike the design of its old news box on its start page, which randomly published the headlines of its 52 news sources that were linked to their own websites, News Stand allows the users to customize the media outlets appearing in their news feed.
Text headlines have been replaced with mini boxes edited by each newspaper, broadcaster and wire service, designed like traditional front pages of newspapers, with big headlines and photos spread beneath the banners.
What hasn't changed is that journalist organizations, especially the financially-squeezed dead-tree media, continue to degenerate into whores for clicks. Photos dictate the new format over text and the mini boxes have been doors to an abundance of raccoon makeup, short skirts and cleavage.
If Naver, the country's most popular website by a large margin, seriously aimed for News Stand to help bring class and integrity to Korean journalism, it appears to have miscalculated massively.
Or perhaps, the clean-up talk was the Internet giant's own misleading headline concealing its true intentions to gag the noisy rabble from bigger media companies.
NHN, the company that operates Naver, believes that more than 25 million Korean computer users have Naver fixed as the start page of their Web browsers. The website controls about 70 percent of Korea's search market, and has been a key gateway where news organizations got most of their online traffic, with readers trickling onto their homepages from the linked headlines.
News organizations have always been uneasy about their overreliance on Naver and constantly accused it of free-riding on their content. Large newspapers like the Chosun Ilbo, which by and large have been failing to extend their offline dominance online, were complaining their articles were just a few of the hundreds of options randomly published by Naver, where brand value was neutralized.
In introducing News Stand, Naver was throwing its hard-to-please media partners a bone: the larger newspapers and broadcasters could safely expect Naver readers to pick them over their smaller competitors.
But be careful what you wish for. Since the introduction of News Stand, overall page views at news sites have dropped dramatically.
While market research firms like Korean Click and Rankey.com have yet to announce the exact data, an official from the Korea Journalists' Association said top newspapers were reporting their online traffic had essentially halved. The damage to smaller outlets was dramatically worse, with some companies saying their page views declined by as much as 70 percent.
The point of News Stand, at least officially, was to allow Internet users the freedom to pick what they considered real news from a sea of intellectual rubbish. In its first week, it did more to repel online readers from news pages altogether.
It's estimated that only 5 percent of Naver's log-in customers are using the customization options on News Stand. During times when more people are getting their news on computers and smartphones rather than print, the format of News Stand may prove too complicated in an environment where quick reads and instant gratification are everything.
It could be argued that Korean news organization dug their own holes by chasing the low-hanging fruit provided by page views instead of finding ways to upgrade the quality of their content and monetizing it.
This resulted in an overreliance on news aggregators like Naver, which doubles as a savior and a competitive threat to their business. While people are increasingly using social media services such as Twitter and Facebook as sources of information, newspapers have been unable to exploit these services to reduce their dependence on the aggregators.
