Daily NK is a site I've linked to and posted from quite a few times recently in relation to the Great Currency Confiscation. Here's an interesting piece about them in the NYT:
Daily NK is one of six news outlets that have emerged in recent years specializing in collecting information from North Korea. These Web sites or newsletters hire North Korean defectors and cultivate sources inside a country shrouded in a near-total news blackout.
While North Korea shutters itself from the outside — it blocks the Internet, jams foreign radio broadcasts and monitors international calls — it releases propaganda-filled dispatches through the government’s mouthpiece, the Korean Central News Agency.
But, thanks to Daily NK and the other services, it is also possible now for outsiders to read a dizzying array of “heard-in-North Korea” reports, many on topics off limits for public discussion in the North, like the health of the country’s leader, Kim Jong-il.
The reports are sketchy at best, covering small pockets of North Korea society. Many prove wrong, contradict each other or remain unconfirmed. But they have also produced important scoops, like the currency devaluation and a recent outbreak of swine flu in North Korea. The mainstream media in South Korea now regularly quote these cottage-industry news services.
“Technology made this possible,” said Sohn Kwang-joo, the chief editor of Daily NK. “We infiltrate the wall of North Korea with cellphones.”
Over the past decade, the North’s border with China has grown more porous as famine drove many North Koreans out in search of food and an increasing traffic in goods — and information — developed. A new tribe of North Korean merchants negotiates smuggling deals with Chinese partners, using Chinese cellphones that pick up signals inside the North Korean border.
These phones have become a main tool of communication for many of the 17,000 North Korean defectors living in the South trying to re-establish contact with their families and friends in the North.
With modern technology the trend seems inevitable, irreversible - but it's not all good news:
Bringing news out of North Korea is risky. Mr. Kim said that one of his informants was stopped last May while trying to smuggle out a video in a small camera hidden in a cosmetics bottle. She is believed to have killed herself in police detention, he said.
“You wonder whether they should let their sources take such risks,” Chang Yong-hoon, who covers North Korea for the mainstream news agency Yonhap, said at a recent forum on the news services. “They’ve produced as many erroneous reports as they have real scoops.”
Kang Chol-hwan, a former North Korean prison camp inmate [and author of Aquariums of Pyongyang - MH] who now writes for the mainstream daily Chosun, said there are “information brokers” in North Korea who sell exaggerated and fake news to outside media. Lee Chan-ho, a chief analyst at the South Korean government’s Unification Ministry, warned that the “flood of raw, unconfirmed reports” complicates the effort to understand the North.
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