WSJ Launches Korean Site

By Alexander C. Kaufman

LOS ANGELES (TheWrap.com) - The Wall Street Journal announced Thursday the release of a Korean-language site, days after the New York Times launched a site translated into Portuguese to target Brazilian readers. The site surpassed two million pageviews while in its beta mode this week, the newspaper said. Earlier this week, the Times - its main rival in the squeezed broadsheet market - expanded its international push by adding a Portuguese site, weeks after launching a Mandarin-language translation.

The Journal, which has English international print editions in Europe and Asia, already has sites in seven other languages, including German, Portuguese, Spanish, Mandarin and Japanese.

"We live in a connected world. What happens in one relatively small market can have a massive impact around the globe," Lex Fenwick, chief executive officer of Dow Jones & Company and the Journal's publisher, said in a statement. "The goal is to take our global footprint and connectivity, and create local platforms through which readers, no matter where they're based, can link to the world. This is particularly important in high-growth markets such as Korea."

The site will be edited from the South Korean capital of Seoul.

The Journal's Chinese edition, launched in 2002, and Japanese edition, launched in 2009, each draw more than five million unique web visitors each month.

"We have built one of Asia's largest news organizations and are ideally positioned -- across geographies, languages and technologies - to deliver the flow of news and analysis the region's business leaders and government decision-makers need to make better informed decisions," Robert Thomson, editor-in-chief of Dow Jones & Company and managing editor of the financial broadsheet, said in the statement.

The site reads local internet service provider details and automatically sets WSJ.com, its main URL, to the Korean site in South Korea, allowing users to change their version using a site menu on the top-left corner of the page.