Typically when I’m searching for news or information regarding the global spread of Korean culture (which more often than not focuses on popular Korean music, more commonly referred to as K-pop), there aren’t any specific websites I regularly check aside from Twitter and what shows up on my own timeline. Throughout this curation process, I’ve realized that the news I find on my Twitter timeline is already a personally curated conglomerate of news sources regarding Hallyu. So I reverse engineered my timeline and found the direct sources that make up my curated list here.
This subreddit is a one-stop shop for all news regarding K-pop and K-pop adjacent information. It’s noteworthy because it’s a moderated community made up of nearly 460,000 subscribers that contribute to the content of the subreddit so you get a variety of opinions and viewpoints as well as the bonus if being able to interact with the original posters as well as other commenters.
Their YouTube channel, 영국남자, (romanized as yeongguknamja) translates to english man. The Korean Englishman channel is notable due to the fact that Josh has been closely connected with Korean communities growing up and has a vast wealth of knowledge regarding K-culture and Hallyu that he shares with their channel subscribers through fun videos.
The now self-titled YouTube channel was previously known as “chonunmigooksaram” which is a romanized Korean statement meaning “I am a person from the United States.” Megan Bowen grew up in the United States but found she had a love for Korean culture that lead her to becoming an expatriate to live in South Korea. She makes videos to share her knowledge about Korean culture and the differences or similarities it has compared to America.
This forum, which has Hallyu right in the name is yet another user based news outlet that allows members of the forum to share pictures, videos and links to other news sites. Only approved members of the forum can make original posts on the Hallyu+ forums in order to minimize the number of click-bait articles and false information being shared.
This website is a great place to find news and information regarding Korean culture and its spread to other countries because it pulls its news stories and information from a variety of different sources. From their own “About Us” page they say “Korea.net is the Internet portal that represents the voice of the Korean government and which promotes Korea online.”
My Media Use This Week
A few weeks ago I made a post about my media use in the span of 24 hours. I’d say the day that I tracked was a moderately lighter day of media consumption than what I typically partake in so revisiting the idea of tracking what I’ve consumed was exciting. This week I was home a lot more than I would normally be because I was sick with the flu, so I had much more free time to read news, watch Netflix and browse through various applications and websites on my phone and laptop.
Much of my time was spent on Twitter and YouTube. I found myself regularly checking Twitter Moments more than I normally would. There I found a few politics related news bits that I thought were interesting and through that I came across a few verified accounts belonging to journalists and news reporters that I ended up following. this week I also watched a lot more news on television than what’s typical for me, but I attribute that to the upcoming elections and wanting to be knowledgable about the candidates in the primaries.
This course made me realize that I should bolster my news consumption by following reputable accounts on media that I regularly use for mindless entertainment. So I made a separate account on Twitter that I now use as a news source on the go. I followed verified accounts for sources such as The Guardian, BBC, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and The Economist (just to name a few) and have regularly read actual news articles instead of waiting for a coworker or family member to tell me about something newsworthy that had recently happened.
