“If only one newspaper survives in South Korea, I want it to be JoongAng.” That is how CEO Changhee Park explained his North Star to me.

It is a striking ambition anywhere. In South Korea, it is almost contrarian.

This is one of the most digitally advanced societies in the world and home to Samsung, LG, and other trailblazers. 

Half of online news users access journalism through Naver, a Web portal like Yahoo, Google, and Reddit combined. Another half use YouTube for news. Trust in news sits just around 30%, well below global averages. And until very recently, general news was almost entirely free.

In that environment, JoongAng Ilbo became the first major South Korean publisher to launch a paywall in 2022, by now reaching over 100,000 paid digital subscribers.

At the same time, print still sets the agenda in South Korea, and print newspaper advertising has not collapsed yet like in North America or Europe. But, as Park put it, “the ground we were standing on is slowly sinking.”

A paywall against the market’s logic

For decades, South Korea’s news economy rested on an uneasy stability.

Print still shaped elite agendas. Advertising accounted for roughly two-thirds of newspaper revenue, with full-page ads from conglomerates signalling influence as much as marketing intent. Digital distribution was dominated by local portals, and especially Naver.

Appear on the portal and you exist. Fall out of it and you disappear.

The system delivered reach and steady cash flow, as Naver paid licence fees to all newspapers for aggregating their content. It also created dependency. 

“People envy our platform payments?,” Park snapped. “I see them as a poisoned chalice.”

The money is easy. But it is revenue newspapers do not control, cannot deepen, and could lose overnight. More damaging still, it cuts publishers off from readers. “You cannot shape your own destiny if you don’t own the relationship,” he explained.

JoongAng Plus was built to escape this trap.

Beware what you wish for

Western publishers often look at South Korea with wonder.

Here was a market where platforms actually paid and where licensing deals softened digital disruption. Compared with regulatory battles in Europe or Australia, Korea sometimes looked like proof that cooperation with Big Tech could work.

But South Korea also shows the cost. When platforms sit between publishers and audiences for years, entire generations grow up without a direct relationship with a news brand. News becomes something consumed inside someone else’s product, ranked by someone else’s algorithms. 

Publishers gain reach, but lose habit. Lose memory. Lose identity.

Power, prestige, and quiet anxiety

At its 60th anniversary, JoongAng is not a weak institution.

Its anniversary Global Media Conference in Seoul in September 2025 was attended by senior political and business leaders, and addressed by the country’s president Lee Jae Myung. He called JoongAng “a compass and a whip” (in Korean, “joongang” literally means “center”).

On stage were global news executives such as Mark Thompson of CNN and Hiroyuki Watanabe of Nikkei.

But JoongAng deliberately placed journalism alongside cultural power. Oscar-winning film director Bong Joon-ho, Netflix star producer Maggie Kang, K-pop pioneer Lee Soo-man, singer Jeon Soyeon, and creators whose work now travels the world via social platforms.

I had to ask my 11-years-old daughter who some of the keynote speakers were. She knew; they are global super-stars. Google “i-dle.”

This is what authority looks like in South Korea today. And yet, Park is uneasy.

Prestige among elites does not guarantee relevance for younger, digital-first audiences. Being invited to the room is not the same as being chosen in a feed. Cultural power at the top can coexist with near invisibility at the bottom.

Digital subscriptions as insurance

In many markets, we frame subscriptions as the sources for growth and renaissance for journalism. In South Korea, they look more like insurance.

“The product value of news declines at extraordinary speed,” Park said. “What once lasted a day now drops within minutes.”

That makes a pure news paywall fragile in a market flooded with free alternatives. Short-lived information cannot sustain a paid relationship on its own.

So JoongAng Plus is built around durability. Depth and analysis. Utility in areas like education or  investment. And products that outlive the news cycle, including book series and events. One of the strongest performers has been memoirs by former Korean presidents.

In 2025, JoongAng launched additional premium products, e.g., a financial news platform with Bloomberg.

Why this matters beyond Asia

It would be easy to dismiss South Korea as an outlier, a media business curiosity and analogy for Korean dish kimchi, a rather acquired taste. I see this story as a warning.

South Korea shows what happens when platforms succeed too well. When reach is abundant, but relationships are thin. When revenue flows, but autonomy drains away.

JoongAng’s decision to focus on direct relationships and charge readers is a recognition that dependence is riskier than uncertainty of freedom.

“If only one newspaper survives in Korea,” Park told me, “I want it to be JoongAng.” In a market long built on stability, that may be the most radical statement of all.

Greg’s Readers First newsletter is a public face of a revenue and media subscriptions initiative by INMA, outlined here. INMA members can subscribe here.

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