The Chosun Ilbo

The Chosun Ilbo (, lit. 'Korea Daily Newspaper'), also known as The Chosun Daily, is a newspaper of record for South Korea    and the oldest active daily newspaper in the country. With a daily circulation of more than 1,800,000, the Chosun Ilbo has been audited annually since the Audit Bureau of Circulations was established in 1993. Chosun Ilbo and its subsidiary company, Digital Chosun, operates the Chosun.com news website, which also publishes news in English, Chinese, and Japanese.

History
The Chosun Ilbo Establishment Union was created in September 1919. The Chosun Ilbo newspaper was founded on 5 March 1920 by Sin Sogu with the financial support of the Daejong Business Association. Cho Jin-Tae, the vice-chairman of the Daejong Business Association was appointed the first President of the newspaper in 1920. However, as the Business Association failed to pay promised finances, the relationship between the Association and Chosun Ilbo broke down five months after its founding, and Cho Jin-Tae was replaced by Yoo Moon-Hwan on 15 August 1920.

On 6 April 1921, after only a year of publishing, the Chosun Ilbo went on hiatus due to financial troubles.

On 31 July 1940, the newspaper published "Lessons of American Realism", the fourth part of an editorial series. Ten days later - following issue 6,923 - the paper was declared officially discontinued by the Japanese ruling government. In the twenty years since its founding, the paper had been suspended by the Japanese government four times, and its issues confiscated over five hundred times before 1932.

When Korea gained independence in 1945, the Chosun Ilbo came back into publication after a five-year, three-month hiatus.

On 1 March 1999, Chosun Ilbo announced that starting the following day (2 March 1999), it would be switching to the horizontal left-to-right writing style already adopted by most other newspapers by the time, ahead of the paper's 79th anniversary. It also made a commitment to preserve and continue using hanja characters despite the change. Consequently, the 1 March 1999 issue (Issue No. 24305) became the last issue of Chosun Ilbo written in the vertical right-to-left style and the last mainstream Korean paper that published in the style. All issues since 2 March 1999 have been in the modern horizontal left-to-right style.

Subsidiaries
Besides the daily newspaper, the company also publishes the Weekly Chosun, the Monthly Chosun, Digital Chosun, Edu-Chosun, and ChosunBiz.

Controversies
The Chosun Ilbo has historically taken a hardline stance against North Korea. For example, it opposed South Korean President Kim Dae-jung's "Sunshine Policy". For this reason, it has attracted heavy criticism and threats from the North.

On 31 May 2019, the newspaper reported that, based on "an unidentified source", the head diplomat of North Korea's nuclear envoy Kim Hyok-chol, had been executed by a North Korean Government firing squad. However, two days later, on 2 June 2019, the top diplomat was seen at a concert sitting a few seats away from North Korea's leader Kim Jong-un.

The Educational Broadcasting System's popular instructor Choi Tae-seong, sued a Chosun Ilbo reporter for publishing an article that defamed him as a supporter of North Korea.

The Chosun Ilbo has been accused of being "chinilbanminjokhaengwi" (친일반민족행위, 親日反民族行爲, "pro-Japanese anti-nationalist activist"), because of controversy over its advocacy of the Korea under Japanese rule. In 2005, the South Korean government and Korean nationalist civic activists investigated whether Chosun Ilbo 'collaborated' with the Japanese Empire. The Chosun Ilbo published articles described as excessively praising the Imperial House of Japan every year from 1938 to 1940. Until 1987, the newspaper had reported favorably on South Korea's military dictatorships.