Yonhap News Agency aims to leap forward from South Korea's leading news wire service to a major multimedia news provider in Asia and beyond as it won the rights Friday to get into the TV news business.
A Yonhap-led consortium became the sole winner of a government license to launch a cable TV news channel. Yonhap's TV broadcasting service is expected to begin during the second half of 2011.
The license will formally be granted in March.
Yonhap was the only one among the four news-channel bidders who passed the minimum score of 800. The qualification criteria centered on the applicants' ability to be fair and responsible and serve public interest as well as their competitiveness in content and capital supply.
Yonhap, which has endeavored to produce news wire stories from Korean perspectives in the Western-dominated global news environment, entered the bid for the TV news channel in efforts to adapt to the rapidly changing media environment and to counter the growing influence of Western media firms, such as CNN and BBC.
The envisioned TV news service is expected to help satisfy the people's right to know through multimedia news contents provision while enhancing Yonhap's role in safeguarding South Korea's "information sovereignty" of delivering news on developments in Korea and around the world from Korean perspectives, instead of relying on Western media.
"As the era of digital multimedia fusion sets in, the barriers between newspapers, broadcasters and news wire services will be gone, and the barriers between the central and provincial areas and even the barriers between countries are forecast to disappear," Yonhap President and CEO Park Jung-chan said.
"By getting into the news channel, Yonhap News Agency will make a leap as a news hub in Asia and eventually a global news channel representing the Republic of Korea," he said.
Yonhap is South Korea's largest news provider, producing content for newspapers, broadcasters, Internet portals, the government and private enterprises on a scale of about 3,000 news articles per day, the largest volume by far among local news organizations.
With a pool of some 550 reporters, including 62 correspondents dispatched around the world, Yonhap's coverage consists of a wide variety of multimedia news content, from articles and photos to video and graphics. With services additionally offered in six foreign languages -- English, Chinese, Japanese, Arabic, Spanish and French -- Yonhap is also the key source of news on Korea for the international community.
Utilizing these assets and through fresh investments in the TV service, Yonhap plans to first start "Yonhap News TV Korea" service before launching "Yonhap News TV Asia" by 2015 and then "Yonhap News TV International."
Yonhap also plans to break the existing TV news formats, such as simple newsreading and straight news reporting in the standard 90-second format, to bring fresh formats that will enable viewers to feel as if they are at the scene where the news is breaking.
It also plans to offer news pieces that provide sufficient background and in-depth news analysis by expert-level journalists and outside reporters, while also inviting viewers to take part in news production through establishing a network of about 1,000 "citizen reporters."