We wuz robbed!
I still can't believe this happens, but this gives a sense of the quality of Korean journalism here. The Korea Times, an English language newspaper which is loaded with typos in headlines almost every day and shoddy journalism, actually stole a story from us.

Our newspaper, the JoongAng Daily, is part of the JoongAng Ilbo, Korea's second-largest newspaper, with a circulation well above 1 million. Anyway, we translate many of their articles for our paper. (JoongAng means central in Korean and Ilbo means daily).

On Monday, the JoongAng Ilbo (Korean version) printed a story about spouses using spyware to spy on their husbands or wives. Apparently, that is getting much more common here. Anyway, the story appeared first in Korean on the JoongAng Ilbo Web site. We assigned a reporter to translate it, and were holding the story to use on a slow news day. It was on our budget for Wednesday. The only problem, the Korea Times translated the JoongAng Ilbo story and used it as their own, in the Tuesday editions. The reporter used her own byline. The story was exactly the same with two slight exceptions: in the anecdotal lede about an anonymous couple only known by "Kim," it was changed to "Ahn." The age of one of them was changed from 38 to 37. The rest of the story, including the quotes by a named consultant and lawyer, were identical.

I pushed hard to do a story of our own about this outrage, but it hasn't happened -- yet, anyway. We'll see what comes out of this. I still can't believe the blatancy of it.