| Yonhap | |
|---|---|
| Hangul | 연합뉴스 (주) |
| Hanja | 聯合뉴스 (株) |
| Revised Romanization | Yeonhap Nyuseu (Ju) |
| McCune–Reischauer | Yŏnhap Nyusŭ (Chu) |
Yonhap News Agency is South Korea's largest news agency. It is a publicly funded company, and based in Seoul, South Korea. Yonhap supplies domestic, foreign news and other information to newspaper, TV broadcast and other media in South Korea.
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Yonhap (meaning "associated" in Korean) was established on December 19, 1980, through the merger of Hapdong News Agency and Orient Press on the model of Japan's Kyodo News Agency. It maintains various agreements with 65 non-Korean news agencies, and also has a services-exchange agreement with North Korea's KCNA agency, signed in 2002.[1] It is the only Korean wire service that works with foreign news agencies,[2] and provides a limited but freely available selection of news on its Internet website in English, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Spanish, Arabic and French.
Yonhap was the host news agency of the 1988 Seoul Summer Olympics, and was elected twice to the board of OANA.
Yonhap is South Korea's only news agency large enough to have 41 correspondents abroad and 110 reporters across the nation.[1] Its largest shareholder is the Korean Broadcasting System (KBS), South Korea's largest public broadcaster.
In 2003, the South Korean government passed a law giving financial and systematic assistance to the agency, to reinforce staff and provide equipment.[2] In the legislation, it has also been given the role of "promoting the country's image" to an international audience.[1] The head of the Yonhap agency is usually affiliated with the government, which critics say harms press freedom and has an impact on news- gathering. However it is government affiliation, rather that press laws (which are supportive of press freedom), which are said to be the cause of any limitations,[3] though the agency does criticise the government.[4]