Yongjin Kim, Korea, is editor-in-chief and CEO of the Korea Center for Investigative Journalism (KCIJ), the first nonprofit online investigative reporting organization in South Korea.
KCIJ runs Newstapa, a news website that presents watchdog journalism in multimedia form.
Kim started his career as a journalist in 1987 at Korean Broadcasting System (KBS), a public broadcasting corporation. He mostly covered criminal justice, human rights, media and foreign affairs. He exposed how the Korean spy agency NIS helped big corporations block people involved in trade unions from getting jobs by doing illegal surveillance and establishing a huge blacklist. In 1992, he received the Journalist Association of Korea (JAK)’s Korea Journalist Award, the country's most prestigious journalism award for the exposure.
He also has won three This Year’s Broadcasting Journalist awards. In 2005, he founded and led an investigative reporting unit in KBS. The unit received more than 30 prestigious national and international journalism awards, including an Investigative Reporters & Editors (IRE) award, under his supervision. In 2005 and 2006, he worked as a visiting professional at IRE.
In 2013, Kim quit KBS frustrated by the constant need to fight the muzzles put on investigative journalism in the mainstream media under the conservative government. He then established KCIJ. Under his leadership, KCIJ/Newstapa has so far received over 120 major journalism awards.
Kim is the author of "They know, but we don't", a bestseller based on the cables of the U.S. Embassy in Seoul that were first exposed by WikiLeaks. He has also co-authored two other books with colleagues, including a textbook on data journalism. He teaches investigative reporting at the Graduate School of Journalism at Semyung University.
Yongjin Kim is a veteran broadcast reporter, who has reported in Korea for thirty years and also plays a critical role in developing Korea’s next generation of investigative reporters.
