Posts tagged KCNA
KCNA Watch attracts bans in North and South Korea
Oct 29th
How it should look: KCNA Watch viewed from an unrestricted Internet connection
KCNA Watch, a website that collects articles, pictures and video from the Korean Central News Agency, isn’t making friends on either side of the Korean border.
A communications regulator in South Korea has blocked access to the service while the North Korean government has restricted access to its services from New Zealand, apparently due to the way KCNA Watch collects its stories.
The South Korea block, which happened on Friday, was reported over the weekend by NK News. KCNA Watch currently operates as a part of NK News.
Visitors to the site More >
AP president concludes latest visit to Pyongyang
Oct 10th
Gary Pruitt, president and CEO of the Associated Press
The president and CEO of the Associated Press, Gary Pruitt, just concluded a four-day visit to Pyongyang during which he toured the city and sat down for an interview with Kim Yong Nam, president of the country’s parliament.
The visit was the first reported trip to North Korea for Pruitt, who took over as CEO of the AP just over a year earlier.
The AP became the first western news agency to open a text and photo bureau in Pyongyang in January 2012 and AP executives have made several visits to the country.
Former AP More >
KCNA hits back at Anonymous
Jun 22nd
The Korean Central News Agency (KCNA) has attacked claims by international hacker collective Anonymous that it managed to steal North Korean military secrets from computer servers. The attack came in a commentary on Friday, just days before Anonymous plans to launch a cyber-attack on North Korean websites.
Earlier this week, a Twitter user claiming to represent Anonymous hackers said the group had managed to infiltrate North Korean servers on the country’s domestic intranet and access sensitive information.
“We completed serveral attacks on your internal Websites and inside your local intranets,” the group said in a message posted to the Pastebin website, which allows More >
KCNA website down? No, it’s still there
Feb 9th
If you’ve been looking for the Korea Central News Agency website over the last day or two, you’ve probably been unable to reach it.
Most browsers are returning an error message similar to this one in Chrome: “Oops! Google Chrome could not find www.kcna.kp.”
But the site is there.
An analysis by NorthKoreaTech.org has revealed the site is unavailable not because the server is down, but because it’s address is missing from the Internet’s Domain Name System (DNS). DNS converts easy-to-read addresses like “kcna.kp” into numeric addresses that computers use to route traffic.
In this case, typing the numeric address in yourself will pull More >
KCNA’s new site gets Juche date
Jan 13th
Just over a week since the Korean Central News Agency completed a major overhaul of its website, several elements of the new site have been changed.
The changes address a couple of things that surprised me when I first reviewed the site on January 5.
The first is the addition of a Juche date.
The date is typically listed in North Korean with a Juche year, then perhaps the western year in parathesis. Juche is the spirit of self reliance on which Kim Il Sung founded the country, and the Juche year refers to the number of years since the birth of Kim More >
KCNA updates its web site
Jan 5th
KCNA, North Korea’s state-run news agency, has relaunched its web site.
The site, which is one of only a handful hosted in Pyongyang, was first launched in late 2010 and has been redesigned a couple of times since it first went online. The new design, which appears to have debuted on January 4, is perhaps the slickest yet from an organization best know for its propaganda output.
The redesign doesn’t appear to have brought with it any new content areas or languages — at least, not yet — but there are a few things worth noting.
The first, and perhaps most striking for More >
North Korean media claims launch success
Dec 12th
North Korea’s state media has claimed success in its attempt to put a satellite in orbit.
Here’s the KCNA bulletin that ran just after noon local time:
The second version of satellite Kwangmyongsong-3 successfully lifted off from the Sohae Space Center in Cholsan County, North Phyongan Province by carrier rocket Unha-3 on Wednesday.
The satellite entered its preset orbit. — KCNA, December 12, 2012.
And here’s the special news broadcast that went out on state TV at just before 12:05pm on Wednesday:
AP/KCNA photo exhibit opens in New York
Mar 17th
A joint photo exhibition being staged by The Associated Press and the Korean Central News Agency opened at New York’s The 8th Floor gallery this week.
The exhibition is one by-product of the AP’s opening of a news bureau in Pyongyang earlier this year and features 79 photographs, including shots from AP photographers, KCNA staffers and material from the KCNA archive.
The pictures are “designed to show what life is like in the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea,” the AP said in a news release.
They include the picture on the right, which is captioned: “A young North Korean dancer leaps by as girls put More >
AP opens Pyongyang bureau
Jan 17th
The Associated Press has opened a news bureau in Pyongyang making it the first western news agency to have a reporter and photographer based in the North Korean capital.
The bureau represents a coup for the AP over the competition, but its close cooperation with the state-run Korean Central News Agency, necessitated to realize the deal, brings with it questions over editorial independence.
AP President Tom Curley and KCNA President Kim Pyong Ho officially opened the bureau in Pyongyang on Monday. It came six months after the two met in New York and signed a basic agreement towards the office.
The bureau will be More >
KCNA website adds Kim Jong Un section
Jan 10th
The sudden death of Kim Jong Il has North Korea’s propaganda machine scrambling to build stories about the life of Kim Jong Un.
The stories are a staple of the North Korean media and occupied hours of broadcast time and columns of newsprint during the era of Kim Jong Il.
Designed to build a personality cult around the leader, his tireless work for the people, warm heart, tough travel schedule or boundless knowledge were all regular features.
Some of the first such stories about Kim Jong Un appeared in the days shortly after Kim Jong Il’s death when state media reported on Kim More >
