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Daily NK () is an online newspaper based in Seoul, South Korea, where it reports on various aspects of North Korean society from information obtained from inside and outside of North Korea via a network of . North Korea is ranked 179 out of 180 in the 2025 World Press Freedom Index, which is compiled by Reporters Without Borders.
The organization's president and editor-in-chief are South Korean, while its journalists are a mix of South Koreans and North Korean defectors.
Daily NK is a recipient of funding from multiple institutions and private donors, including the National Endowment for Democracy, National Endowment for Democracy an NGO funded by the U.S. Congress. Daily NKs president is Lee Kwang-baek." Fast and Accurate North Korea News". Daily NK. The amount of Daily NKs funding from the National Endowment for Democracy since 2016 is available in the public sphere. The organization is part of a consortium with the Unification Media Group, which is a South Korea–based non-profit organization that produces and delivers radio content into North Korea via short-wave radio broadcasts.
The organization has a content sharing arrangement with The Diplomat, and has partnered up with the Transitional Justice Working Group. It also has a relationship with Factiva.
Thae Yong-ho, a diplomat from North Korea prior to his 2016 defection, also contributed a series of columns about North Korea-South Korea relations. Thae Yong Ho Video Series
Andrei Lankov, a well-known Russian scholar of North Korean affairs, occasionally publishes columns through the site, mainly in Korean.
Fyodor Tertitskiy, a Russian scholar of North Korean affairs, publishes mainly history-focused columns for the website in Korean, which are occasionally translated into English.
Bruce Songhak Chung, the head of the Satellite Analysis Center at the Korea Institute for Security Strategy, writes regular columns for the publication based on satellite imagery analysis.
NK News also reported in 2021 that Daily NKs website had been hacked for at least from March to June, and that readers of the website were not notified of it. The website was allegedly poorly protected, and an exploit in Microsoft Edge was used to deliver the malware, which would take screenshots and steal personal information, such as passwords. A security research group linked the attack to a North Korean group, but did not elaborate on their claims. In a later statement, Daily NK claimed that it had discovered the breach in 2020, but deliberately chose not to inform users, and also claimed that the breach affected only staff members.
Daily NK was the first news organization to obtain and published excerpts from explanatory materials regarding North Korea's "anti-reactionary thought law," which went into effect in late 2021. The explanatory materials were used in a 38 North article regarding North Korea's intensification of its "war against foreign influence."
Interviews arranged by Daily NK were used in a BBC article that investigated speculation surrounding starvation deaths in North Korea in 2023. North Korea: Residents tell BBC of neighbours starving to death
North Korea's National Reconciliation Council, in an official statement carried by KCNA, has criticized Daily NK for what it called "anti-DPRK ," and Lee Chan-ho of the South Korean Ministry of Unification warned in 2010 that the "flood of raw, unconfirmed reports" from organizations including Daily NK "complicates efforts to understand the North." Sewoong Koo, the founder of Korea Expose, has written that "Daily NK often relies on anonymous informers in the North to run critical articles about the regime, and its track record on accuracy is spotty at best." Meanwhile, the JoongAng Ilbo ran a story that commented, "Daily NK, a website run by North Korean defectors in the South, has put out questionable reports in the past, which mainstream media outlets in South Korea have cited, only to find out they were untrue."
Many high-profile experts on North Korea follow and have even expressed praise for Daily NKs work, albeit sometimes with caveats regarding the media outlet's sourcing. Joshua H. Pollack, a senior research associate at the Middlebury Institute, has said on Twitter that Daily NK
Thomas Byrne, the president of The Korea Society, has stated that "Daily NK is our only source on financial news, as it is, from North Korea." Anna Fiefield, a former journalist at the Washington Post and the author of "The Great Successor: The Divinely Perfect Destiny of Brilliant Comrade Kim Jong Un," has commented that "... there is lots of great reporting on, including in South Korea. There's an outlet called Daily NK that is doing a lot of this kind of journalism. They have citizen reporters inside North Korea or informants who can tell what's going on in there. They are providing a lot of information about what's happening in North Korea."
Peter Ward, a NK News contributor and researcher of North Korea's economy, has said that Daily NK is a "generally reliable outlet" and that the organization uses "methods that are common to all media companies who try to report from inside the country: they often have to rely on single sources and report on rumors that are circulating." He went on to say that, Daily NK "does its best to avoid single-source claims utilizing a network of multiple informants in the country and cross-reference with other media reports and South Korean academic work" and that while "some have cast doubt on DNK's sources generally, others have said that it's only reliable as a source for information in the regions far away from Pyongyang."
Ian Urbina, the director and founder of The Outlaw Ocean Project, has called Daily NK "the best investigative-news venue related to North Korea." Did the China Investigation Have Impact?
The OECD, in a report titled "North Korea: The last transition economy?," cites several Daily NK articles. The report notes that, "Although UN-related international organisations, a large number of South Korean authorities and several NGOs sometimes report statistics on North Korea, their reliability and mutual consistency is also questionable, due to restrictions on visits and lack of data sources (Table 1). While information from North Korea defectors is often used to make up for data shortages, using witness accounts and interviews has pitfalls, including sample bias (Mimura, 2019), limited means of verification and inaccuracy of memories (Song and Denney, 2019). It is essential to bear these limitations in mind when interpreting the numbers quoted in this paper, which alongside official publications also draws to an unusual extent on press reports."
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