Radio France journalist Nicolas Rocca. Photo by Choi Won-suk

• ●Living in Seoul as a foreign correspondent gives a rare opportunity for self-fulfillment, says Radio France journalist Nicolas Rocca.

• ●Global media’s focus has expanded beyond the typical Samsung and North Korea pieces to K-pop, K-dramas and South Korea’s pandemic response.

French radio journalist Nicolas Rocca likens reporting on South Korea to peeling an onion. You need to keep removing layer after layer to find what lies at the inner-most core.

Like peeling an onion, the more he digs into South Korean society, Rocca, 24, says, the more he realizes its complex nature and that’s why he needs to keep improving his knowledge of the country to ensure more accurate and precise coverage.

“I heard about some Europeans based in Asia who had spoken as if they knew everything about the country they’re based in, although they’ve been there only a couple of years,” he said during a recent interview at the Korean Culture and Information Service (KOCIS) office in central Seoul. “I personally think two or three years of living experience is not long enough to make people knowledgeable about the society,” he said.

He went on to say, “If they don’t speak the local language, they cannot freely and directly communicate with the locals, and I think their chances of fully understanding the country are slim.”

Rocca had been familiar with East Asia even before he came to Korea as a Radio France correspondent. He spent eight years living in China where his parents were teachers, and he also studied Cantonese in Taiwan.

Although there was another job opening for a correspondent in Shanghai, he applied to become a correspondent in Seoul because he wanted to develop his understanding of East Asia beyond China.

In France, Rocca said, demand for news about South Korea has been increasing in recent years, noting that coverage has expanded into several different areas from traditional newsmakers – North Korea and Samsung. Pop music, dramas, South Korea’s relations with Japan and the country’s pandemic response also became popular topics to French audiences, according to the journalist.

Among them, he said, K-pop and North Korea are the two most-popular news items.

“The other day, I worked on a brief story about North Korean leader Kim Jong-un. It was not a serious one at all. But the article was very popular and had been viral for days, which surprised me,” he said.

When he worked on articles about BTS or other popular K-pop bands, their fans would flock to his social media and comment on his reporting.

Like other correspondents, Rocca has been covering everything about Korea from K-pop to conglomerates to diplomacy. Such comprehensive coverage sometimes puts him to the test, especially when he works on a 20-minute, in-depth piece covering South Korea. He initially hired someone to translate Korean into French and vice versa, but realized that he couldn’t pull off precise reporting about the featured topic because the translation was not always thorough. He then started to work with a translator fluent in both Korean and English, which turned out to be better for his reporting.

Covering Korean politicians sometimes reminds him of French counterparts as he found parallels in their policy initiatives.

Rocca sat down with Gyeonggi Governor Lee Jae-myung to cover his basic income proposal. He realized Lee is a South Korean equivalent of the politician Benoit Hamon, who ran unsuccessfully in France’s 2017 presidential election.

“Like Governor Lee, Socialist Party politician Hamon also pushed for basic income. They were poles apart in popularity though. Lee is very popular among Koreans as recent public opinion polls found him as one of the two leading presidential hopefuls, but Hamon was not.”

Over the past 10 months since his arrival in South Korea, he came to develop a perspective comparing the two countries. One of the striking differences is younger people’s reactions to politics.

In France, he said, people in their 20s are open to discussing politics, but young Koreans he has met are cautious about revealing their political orientations. “In Korea, politics seems to be sort of a taboo, especially for public discussion among the younger people,” he said. “The other thing that I was intrigued by was a generational division between younger and older Koreans.”

The French journalist praised the South Korean government’s COVID-19 response.

“There was a problem in securing vaccine supplies. But in general, I think South Korea has done a great job in the pandemic response,” he said. “One of the things that impressed me was the government’s efforts to keep its citizens informed of the developments of the virus cases. Unlike some European countries, South Korea took the case very seriously from the onset of the virus outbreak and its consistent policy seems to have helped lower fatalities.”

**If you have any questions about this article, feel free to contact us at kocis@korea.kr.**