Outlet profile

Korea JoongAng Daily

South Korean mainstream, center-right (conservative-leaning corporate daily)

Owned byPublished by JoongAng Holdings (JoongAng Group), a South Korean media conglomerate chaired by Hong Seok-hyun. The group's founder, Samsung founder Lee Byung-chul, started the parent JoongAng Ilbo in 1965, and the group formally separated from Samsung in 1999. The English edition is a sister product of the Korean-language JoongAng Ilbo.

FundingCommercial. It relies mainly on advertising and on subsidies from the larger JoongAng Ilbo group. Its main sources of revenue are group-level advertising, subscriptions and syndication. Korean advertisers include large conglomerates. Its content is largely free online. It is not state-funded.

On the administrationmixed

Background

The parent JoongAng Ilbo was founded in 1965 by Lee Byung-chul, who also founded Samsung, and the group separated from Samsung in 1999. The English-language Korea JoongAng Daily grew out of the group's English operations and has been published in association with The New York Times (earlier the International Herald Tribune) since about 2000. In 2011 the group's media operations were reorganized under a holding company, which was renamed JoongAng Holdings in 2018. Chairman Hong Seok-hyun, who has family ties to the Samsung founding family, has led the group, and critics have noted its closeness to big business. The JoongAng Ilbo is generally seen as a centrist-to-conservative mainstream paper, and the English edition largely translates and adapts its Korean-language reporting, with some original coverage and wire content. Its editorials usually support the U.S.-South Korea alliance and economic openness. In 2026 its coverage of the second Trump administration has focused on tariffs and the Korea-U.S. trade deal, demands for Korean investment such as the Alaska LNG project, scaled-back joint drills, and Trump's remarks on Korea's role in the Iran war. It reports Seoul's pushback on Trump's claims and the strains in ties, without a consistently pro- or anti-Trump line. It has been criticized at times, like other major Korean outlets, for relying on unnamed government sources.

Sources

Profile compiled 2026-10-15; refreshed when ownership, funding, or the administration changes.

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