Tuesday, October 21, 2014

Main Street in South Korea: Day 1 on 2014 Korea-Australia Journalists Exchange

It's been a full-on and fascinating first day for the 2014 Korea Australia Journalists Exchange.

The initiative by Australia's Walkley Foundation and the Korea Press Foundation involves yours truly as delegation leader, my ABC colleague Lucy McNally, Andrew Tillett of The West Australian and Patrick Witton of The Big Issue.

The weather as expected has been cool and rainy at times so umbrellas were at the ready courtesy of our program director Haejoo Kang. 

Here's the view from our meeting at the Korea Press Foundation boardroom this morning:




Today's briefings took us to the Korea Press Foundation, the Foreign Ministry and the Embassy of Australia where we met with Ambassador Bill Paterson and other top diplomats.

Discussions included the digital challenges facing the Korean media where heard a familiar global story about declining advertising revenues and falling traditional readership; the status of Australia's Free Trade Agreement with Korea; and the outlook (and a pessimistic one at that) for a peaceful reunification between North and South Korea.

And those tensions with North Korea are alive and kicking. Here's a story from page one of the Korea Times which greeted us this morning. The tensions of course are constant and therefore a running story.

However it will make our visit to the DMZ on Wednesday an interesting and much anticipated one.



Some pictures here from today's briefing at the Korea Press Foundation and discussion on "all of the above":







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