Naver News Partnership Committee on Thursday held a “Naver News Partnership Committee policy briefing” at the Seoul Press Center in Jung-gu and announced new rules for partnership reviews and operating evaluations. It also said it will begin accepting new applications for news content and search partnerships from March 3 via the Naver News partnership guidance page.

The Naver News Partnership Committee consists of a policy committee, a partnership review committee, an operating evaluation committee and an objections review committee. It also plans to set up a diversity task force to consider ways to promote regional media outlets. The partnership review and operating evaluation rules enacted by the policy committee focus on contributing to an environment that respects the value of journalism and on securing procedural legitimacy, fairness and reliability in partnership reviews and operating evaluations.

The partnership review committee will oversee new partnership reviews for news content partnerships and search partnerships. Reviews are scheduled to be held once a year. Quantitative and qualitative assessments each account for 50 points. The quantitative assessment will check basic requirements for providing news services in multiple areas, including article production capacity and the media outlet’s operating status. A qualitative assessment will be conducted only for media outlets that meet the quantitative criteria, introducing a review method by evaluators’ areas of expertise. This is expected to secure fairness and professionalism throughout the review process.

The operating evaluation of existing Naver partner media outlets will be handled by the operating evaluation committee. The committee will hold regular monthly meetings to continuously monitor whether partner media outlets comply with the rules and assign evaluation scores based on the results.

If objections are filed over the results of partnership reviews and operating evaluations, an objections review committee will be convened to deliberate. Media outlets can file objections through the independently constituted objections review committee regarding procedural violations or errors, or omissions in their explanations.

Members of the partnership review committee and the operating evaluation committee will be selected at random for each evaluation session from a pool of candidates. The pool is made up of former members of reader and viewer committees run by media outlets that meet certain requirements, as well as institutions and committees that conduct reviews and evaluations related to media coverage, including the Media Diversity Commission, the Public Opinion Concentration Survey Committee, the Korea Newspaper Ethics Commission and the Internet Newspaper Ethics Commission.

Choi Seong-jun (최성준), chair of the News Partnership Committee, said it will focus its capabilities on ensuring fairness, independence and professionalism in news services based on the newly enacted “Naver News partnership review and operating evaluation rules.” He said the committee will operate the overall review and evaluation process transparently and fairly.