About
Information
arrives late.
The light from a star left it seconds, minutes, hours or decades ago. You are looking at it now, and it is already the past.
Information crosses a border the same way. By the time something that happened in Seoul has been translated and written up elsewhere, months can have passed — and it still gets introduced as what Korea is doing right now.
SEOUL EDITOR closes that gap. We do not work from the version that arrives translated. We read the figures moving on the Korean side, the day they move.
What we watch
Collected automatically every morning at 07:00 Japan time.
- NAVER search volume730 days, re-fetched daily
- Blog titleswords that have just appeared
- YouTubeuploads and view counts
- Google rising searchesKorea and Japan side by side
- Statistics Koreawhat was actually bought online
- The Korean pressmovements that have just been named
How a figure is checked
One wrong number and this publication is worth nothing. So every figure has to pass the same rules before it is printed.
- Figures come only from the collected files. Never from memory or an estimate.
- Search ratios are compared only inside a single fetch. Numbers taken separately are never set beside each other as “N times”.
- A day that returned nothing is not counted as a zero. The number of days that did return is always stated.
- Year-on-year comparisons are aligned to the same month and the same span of dates.
- We try to break a reading before we publish it. A reading that breaks is either reported as broken or not reported at all.
What we do not write
- A figure taken from the press is attributed to the press and kept separate from anything we measured. We do not adopt other people’s numbers as our own.
- “Peak” and “already over” are written only when there is evidence for them. The real high point may sit outside the window we can see.
- On a day with nothing worth publishing, we publish nothing. A fixed number of pieces per day is not the point of this.
About the charts
The chart on a piece is not a photograph or an illustration. It is drawn from the collected figures themselves — what that piece found, as it was found. When the numbers change, the chart is redrawn.