Dan Brown/Clara Zid March 2025
“The Daily North Korean” is Kim Jon Un’s nightmare. This online media outlet reports on North Korea, a mysterious country for most people on the outside, but a country where 25 million people go about their lives. Many of them in prisons. Exposing this, and reporting from the inside, is what Daily NK is all about, filling a unique role in the media landscape.
Daily Nk’s reporter Donghui Mun is born south of the 38:th parallel on the Korean peninsula, in what since the armistice 1953 is South Korea. But his focus is what happens north of the border, in the uniquely closed society run by the heirs of the country’s founder: Kim Il Sung, a former guerrilla leader opposing the harsh Japanese occupation of the peninsula.
-North Korean citizens are accustomed to living under strict state control and remain largely unaware of the extent to which their rights are violated, says Mun. They are unable to assert their political or civil rights and experience restrictions on their freedoms in nearly every aspect of daily life. Those who deviate from government control face harsh punishments.
And, in some cases, incarceration in political prison camps. Donghui Mun first learned about them in college, and was horrified. At the time not only South Korea but also the international community was largely unaware of North Korea’s human rights issues and the suffering within the prison camps.
The prison system is called Kwan-li-so and is notorious for it’s harsh conditions, including forced labour, torture, and severe malnutrition. Various human rights organizations and experts estimate that between 80,000 and 120,000 individuals are detained. The United Nations and other international bodies have repeatedly called for the dismantling of the camps and the release of detainees.
Donghui Mun felt someone should take the initiative to expose the conditions in the camps and initially started to work for an NGO. Which led to a position at ”Daily NK” in 2019.
-I felt that someone needed to bring this issue to light and I came to the conclusion that reporting on North Korea through Daily NK would be a more effective approach, says Mun.
Mun is today 41 years old and studied Sociology at Hanyang University and mathematics at Jeonbuk National University before starting work as a journalist.
“Covering North Korea from South Korea is extremely challenging. First and foremost, communicating with our contacts is very difficult”
Daily NK is manned by people who have left North Korea, South Koreans and a few foreign nationals. Some Daily NK reporters have family members in North Korea, while others do not. The reporters at Daily NK do not work for political or religious reasons; most are individuals who aspire to be journalists and are dedicated to bringing news about North Korea to the outside world.
The articles are primarily based on information and documents provided by citizen journalists on the ground.
Daily NK builds its reporting on closely following what is put out by the regime but has also managed to build a network of collaborators, citizen journalists, inside North Korea which gives unique insights.
-Covering North Korea from South Korea is extremely challenging. First and foremost, communicating with our contacts in North Korea is very difficult, says Mun.
-North Korean citizens cannot make international calls. That requires using Chinese mobile networks clandestinely using Chinese mobile phones.
The North Korean authorities strictly monitor, track, and severely punish the use of international calls and as a result, it is challenging to exchange large amounts of information at once.
-We must schedule calls at designated times, and the conversations are brief; moreover, poor call quality often makes it difficult to understand the content, says Mun.
Additionally, international calls only work near the northern Chinese border, making it hard to obtain information from those located inland.
-We try to communicate and exchange information with them as much as we can, but the process is exceedingly difficult and risky, says Mun.
Communication with their collaborators through China poses another challenge.
-We would like to use secure messaging apps, but the use of such applications is restricted in China. Additionally, the relatively low level of digital literacy among our contacts in North Korea poses further limitations, says Mun.
Apart from citizen reporters on the ground Daily NK:s staff analyse satellite imagery and compares what they see with the reports from their citizen journalists. The reporters are exposed to constant threats from North Korea. To protect them and the collaborators, Daily NK operates under conditions of anonymity.
“In 2009, we broke the story of North Korea’s currency reform before the authorities officially announced it”
Given the difficult reporting environment in North Korea, it remains close to impossible to “independently” confirm many stories. However, Daily NK has a record of accurately publishing breaking stories on the situation in the closed country. It was Daily NK that in September 2024 could report that buffer zones were set up on the Sino-North Korean border with shoot-to-kill orders. And during covid Daily NK could report on school closures almost a week before it was confirmed by North Korean state media.
-In 2009, we broke the story of North Korea’s currency reform before the authorities officially announced it. And we covered the North Korean leader Kim Jong-un’s cardiovascular treatment in 2020 and his first visit to China, says Mun.
A large portion of Daily NK’s funding sources is in the public sphere. One of the biggest donors is the US-based National Endowment for Democracy (NED), a programme that has been hit hard by the recent actions by the Trump administration and the future of Daily NK and many other independent, US-funded media outlets is currently uncertain.
North Korea’s involvement in the Ukraine conflict through the deployment of troops is an issue that the Daily NK follows closely.
-What is particularly concerning is that many North Korean soldiers are being deployed to the Ukraine-Russia front without even being aware of it. This reflects the North Korean regime’s tendency to treat its citizens as mere expendable tools, says Mun.
-Although it is reported that these soldiers receive wages, the actual consent and payment methods remain unclear, suggesting that the authorities are pursuing military and political gains at the expense of their soldiers’ lives.
-There are reports of numerous North Korean casualties, whose exact scale and circumstances remain unclear, but the support provided to these casualties appears to be severely inadequate.
North Korean citizens are often unaware that their children have been deployed.
-As external information seeps into North Korea, rumors are circulating among the populace, and citizens are concerned for their children, says Mun.
Reaching the readers in North Korea is another major challenge. They cant access the internet at will. And the government doesn’t look kindly on the The Daily NK. Its website is attacked by the North Korean army of internet-soldiers and access is of course blocked from within the country.
The Daily NK is therefore one of the over 200 independent media that has sought refuge behind Qurium’s firewalls.
“It is difficult for the general North Korean public to view our news; our audience mainly comprises of hackers, overseas workers, and Korean IT professionals abroad”
Out of the 25 million North Korean, only 10,000 people are connected to the Internet. Most of them, according to the Digital 2024 Global Reports, belongs to expats and the country’s elite.
Occasionally, Daily NK website logs show IP addresses originating from North Korea, language settings are set to KP, the North Korean language.
-That indicates that some users within North Korea are accessing the site, although they are few in numbers. Sometimes the access [with KP-settings] comes from abroad, we suspect that is North Korean users that managed to use VPNs, (Virtual Private Networks allowing access from an international IP address)
-But overall, it is difficult for the general North Korean public to view our news; our audience mainly comprises of hackers, overseas workers, and Korean IT professionals abroad who are interested in news about internal North Korean issues.
Analysing the situation in North Korea needs special care, according to Mun.
-When examining the myriad issues in North Korea, the West often fail to adequately account for intrinsic factors and the historical-cultural context—such as Juche ideology, personality cult, and the unique political and social structures—that underpin the regime, says Mun and points to the decisions and actions of the North Korean leadership not being merely responses to external pressures; they are based on complex internal political dynamics and strategies aimed at regime survival.
-A comprehensive approach that considers these internal political dynamics, the ideological framework, and the cultural background of North Korea is essential. We must be cautious of interpretations based solely on fragmented information or biased by a particular ideology, and instead adopt a multidimensional perspective, says Mun.
-Such an approach helps us more accurately understand the intricate strategies and internal structure of the North Korean regime.
While mainstream media typically report on the information provided by North Korea and try to interpret its actions Daily NK strive to uncover and disseminate the deeper, hidden realities that the regime seeks to conceal.
-This can serve as a catalyst for breaking the regime’s restrictive information control mechanisms, says Mun.
-Our work contributes to increasing international diplomatic pressure, which in turn can act as a critical resource in promoting change within North Korea.
Daily NK is hosted with Virtualroad since 2022.