The official website has this pop-up:
The Korea Herald has the story:
After all of the circus hoopla and controversy surrounding the launch of the Korean version of the Naked News franchise, its existence now hangs by a pithy thread as production came to a screeching halt since Thursday -- just one month after its inception. The problem? Money.
Nine of the anchors have yet to be compensated for their work during the month the service has been up while customer service has ceased its operation leaving 260,000 paid subscribers for the month of July, hanging, according to local reports.
The problem began when management of the Naked News Korea branch requested its anchors contracted to present news only in semi-nude form (i.e. in lingerie and bikini tops) to strip down completely for its pay-for-play adults-only version.
This prompted five of its anchors to hand in their resignations while the rest of its personalities stayed on.
Oh what the fuck, don't you understand what naked means? This isn't the car show, you're not getting paid to stand there in bikinis and make stupid gestures. Anyway, if you go to the site and click on "Meet our anchors!" you can see the five remaining ones: 하혜지, 한민경, 이세연, 최선이, 김재경.
The sports daily Ilgan Sports conducted an interview on Wednesday with one of the program's anchors who asked to remain anonymous and revealed she had been unable to get a hold of management in order to clarify their grievances over unpaid wages.
"We've been told to be patient and to wait but we have yet to be informed of anything. There is no one we can contact who can clear this up. No one's returning our calls and we've just been informed the company's head John Chau have flown out of the country," she was quoted as saying.
"We feel like we've been conned and cajoled into doing this. Even through opposition from family members of our participation in this program we all felt we were pioneers taking part in something new. We've reported this to the Ministry of Labor so we just have to wait and see what happens."
Every day hundreds of people come to my site Googling for "Naked News Korea." I'm not going to put in a Naked News category yet, but to organize things a little for visitors:
* May 7th, 2009: "Korea Should Make Naked English" (seriously, that's a really good idea)
* June 24th, 2009: "Naked News could be all right"
* July 9th, 2009: "'Naked News Korea' under review by standards council"According to the communications watchdog, the contents of the site have been closely monitored since it began and an episode in which its presenters discussed female orgasms was deemed vulgar and inappropriately suggestive.
I said "still not naked" because the plan was to have the anchors just wear lingerie. From an article in May:
While South Korea is one of the world’s most-wired countries with widespread high-speed Internet access, the country has taken a stance over nudity and porn. Two years ago, South Korea blocked hundreds of foreign adult content sites and strengthened its obscenity laws.
Warda said that there most likely will be some hurdles with delivering news naked, but it should be well-received in South Korea.
"Like Japan they cannot show the pubic area, [but] appetite for all forms of adult entertainment is substantial," he said. "These are hardworking, hard-playing people."
이세연.
The Chosun Ilbo interviewed the woman above, Lee Se-yeon, during which she dropped the gem:
"Please focus on the news rather than the breasts."
The piece continues:
Lee said the company plans to maintain the current level of nudity and go no further since it reflects the cultural norms in Korea. Therefore, it is highly contextual to the changes in people's thoughts and trend. "If there is a consensus among people on more nudity, the contents can go along with such changes," she said.
Creating a version of "Naked News Korea" for teenagers was a weird choice, but it's worth repeating that in spite of "the cultural norms in Korea," there are plenty of television shows on for free that are more provokative and blatantly sexual than Naked News. The most ridiculous ones, in my opinion, are the various racing girl pool tournaments.
Pretty much all you hear are the click-click-click of cameras each time a woman bends over. Once they had a tournament between Russian and Korean models, and either they got the worst Russian pool players they could find, or they got a team of ringers to wear model outfits for the Korean team, because it was brutal.
Hours of entertainment.
7 comments:
And another foreign company learns the joys of partnering with a Korean concern...
A number of years ago I worked for a dot.com in Seattle (not MSFT, not AMZN, but we did at one point have a higher market cap than Amazon.com). Anyway, the sales guy in the cubicle I shared a wall with told me he had landed a partnership deal with a Korean dot.com. One thing our company did was aggregate content and supply feeds to other web sites. So like if you were a travel agency, you could have a weather forecast feed on your site. If you were a bank, you could have stock info "beamed" into your site.
The Korean "partner" would arrange all the deals with Korean sites. We'd beam, he'd take a cut, all was good.
Fast forward a couple months. The Korean partner announced he had registered our domain name in Korea (both the straight up .co.kr version and a version with our company name but -korea.com). And he was going to set out on his own using our business model.
Ummm. I heard the sales guy trying to explain copyrights, trademarks, non compete agreements, etc. Much to no avail.
I think it all ended up being so much domain name squatting. The Korean "partner" never got his biz up 'n' running. He eventually agreed to turn the domain names that used our company's trademarks over to our company in return for some first class paid vacation to New York City (on our dime).
Geez. I bet he spent most of his trip complaining New York pizza didn't have corn on it and rushing around trying to find a Korean restaurant for breakfast, lunch, and dinner...
OP:
Oh what the fuck, don't you understand what naked means?
Seriously, Brian, I thought you'd show a bit more sympathy to a group of people whose contract says one thing ("present news only in semi-nude form (i.e. in lingerie and bikini tops)") but were pressured to do another ("strip down completely for its pay-for-play adults-only version").
Good point.
mindmetoo, what was it in the guy's stellar background that led for your company to partner with his?
최선이 (and possibly 김재경) are the only ones who could do the Naked News proud anyway. Damn, Miss 최 is built!
kushibo, I don't know. The dot.com boom was a crazy time. You were mostly trying to amass the biggest number of users so you could then sell your whole enterprise to Microsoft or Yahoo or Hotbot (google wasn't a big player back then).
||The problem began when management of the Naked News Korea branch requested its anchors contracted to present news only in semi-nude form (i.e. in lingerie and bikini tops) to strip down completely for its pay-for-play adults-only version.
This prompted five of its anchors to hand in their resignations while the rest of its personalities stayed on. ||
That's one newspaper's interpretation of events. Did anyone get to see the actual contract?
Then again, we've all had our experience with how Korean contracts say one thing but we're expected to read between the lines.
Post a Comment