The Price of Innovation — Joongang and the Debt of Legacy Media

In June 2026, JTBC declared default after failing to repay 20.6 billion won in securitized borrowings. Three days later, five core affiliates of the JoongAng Group filed for corporate rehabilitation with the Seoul Bankruptcy Court: JoongAng Holdings, JTBC, Contentree JoongAng, Megabox JoongAng, and JoongAng P&I. The group's total borrowings stood at roughly 2.8 trillion won, and cross-guarantees among affiliates topped 200 billion won. Credit rating agencies downgraded JTBC to 'CCC' and the JoongAng Ilbo to 'BB-' in unison. The aftershocks reached the parent company too. On the 19th of the same month, the JoongAng Ilbo was declared in final default after failing to redeem 22 billion won in commercial paper.

At a press conference, JoongAng Group Vice Chairman Hong Jung-do bowed 90 degrees three times and said, "I am truly sorry for causing such trouble." One of Korea's flagship general-programming channels and its parent group had entered court-supervised restructuring, something the industry had never seen. This was not the result of a single event. It looks closer to the cumulative product of more than a decade of attempts and failures at change, layered on top of an entire industry sinking.

"We Have to Cross the River"

Around 2016 and 2017, talk of the New York Times' digital transformation came up often inside the JoongAng Group. It was nearly the only case of breaking through the print crisis with a digital subscription model. At the time, the Korean newspaper industry was living through three things at once: declining subscribers, fading interest in print, and a shift of news-distribution power toward Naver. There was no guaranteed answer in "becoming Korea's New York Times," but the sense that there would be no future without change ran wide, top to bottom.

That will showed up in hiring. In 2015, its 50th anniversary year, the JoongAng Ilbo made "digital first" a task for the whole organization and brought in Lee Sok-woo, a former Kakao CEO, as co-CEO of Joins and head of its digital strategy division. Lee had started as a JoongAng Ilbo reporter in the early 1990s before moving through IBM Korea, NHN, and Kakao. The transformation he led did not stay boxed in one department; it spread across the organization.

In the same period the group had another engine in JTBC. That a newspaper-centered group held a separate broadcasting asset was itself an advantage. JTBC, launched in December 2011, rose to first place in trust and influence surveys for five straight years after its 2016 exclusive on the tablet PC tied to the Park Geun-hye and Choi Soon-sil scandal. In Sisa Journal and SisaIN surveys, JTBC's influence jumped from 27.5% in 2016 to 57.5% in 2017, and its trust from 34.4% to 55.8%. In Gallup Korea's survey, its news preference climbed to 44% in the first quarter of 2017, far ahead of second-place KBS.

Between Ambition and Inertia

A separate unit where developers and reporters worked side by side took shape in this period. Data journalism, card-news content like "Sully," audio channels like "Deutdokra," and digital specials that drew millions of views came out one after another. They won journalism awards, and the line "at least JoongAng does it best" repeated through the industry.

Inside, though, other voices were just as loud. "Print is still the essence." "Isn't the political and legal beat the core?" That inertia kept pulling back. A step forward was often followed by a return to the old way of working. While investment and attachment coexisted, change happened at the level of teams and projects but never moved the organization's center of gravity.

This led to the 2022 paid digital news model, The JoongAng Plus. It split content into four tiers, free, members-only, subscription-only, and paid (PLUS), and offered specialized IT, economy, and culture content for 9,900 won a month (opening discount price). It was the first time a Korean general daily had gone after paywalls on this scale. The target was "100,000-plus" paid subscribers by 2025, and three years on, in 2025, it passed 100,000 cumulative subscribers and 2.2 million monthly active visitors, hitting the goal on paper. Monthly revenue, converted on a monthly-subscription basis, sat around 100 million won. The gap between "cumulative" sign-ups and actual retention, and the workload on the separate staff producing paid content, came up alongside it. Unlike rivals such as the Chosun Ilbo, which were cautious about paywalls, the JoongAng Ilbo carried this experiment alone. Relative to the scale of investment, it has not yet turned into revenue that can prop up the core business.

The Peak of Trust, and After

Under anchor Sohn Suk-hee, the JTBC Newsroom held first place in trust and influence surveys for six years and four months, from 2013 to 2020. In this period an identity that called itself "true journalism" took root inside JTBC. In a 2025 survey of journalists, Sohn Suk-hee was again named the most influential journalist of the past 30 years, with three times the votes of second-place Kim Eo-jun. JTBC built unrivaled content among the general-programming channels with variety shows like "Hidden Singer," "Knowing Bros," and "Please Take Care of My Refrigerator," and dramas like "SKY Castle" and "Itaewon Class." Pride in making work unbound by old broadcast conventions ran through the organization. As the YouTube channel "Workman" became a hit too, so did the confidence that JTBC was a different animal from the other general-programming channels.

After Sohn Suk-hee left the Newsroom in 2020, both ratings and preference slid. In Gallup Korea's survey, JTBC's news-channel preference fell to 14% in the fourth quarter of 2019, swapping places with KBS, and dropped to 7% by the fourth quarter of 2021. (It recovered somewhat in 2024 and 2025.)

In this period, JTBC and Contentree JoongAng, the group's content holding company, moved aggressively on major sports broadcasting rights. In 2019, JTBC became the first non-terrestrial Korean broadcaster to take the rights to four Olympics from 2026 to 2032. In 2024, the group's sports subsidiary signed with FIFA for the rights to four tournaments, including the 2026 World Cup in North and Central America. Contentree JoongAng is reported to have put roughly $125 million (about 190 billion won) into these rights. It stands out that the group pushed ahead alone rather than forming a consortium with other broadcasters. Voices in the industry said there was a growth strategy but no profit strategy, and that the group kept placing bets too large for a broadcaster its size.

The Structural Collapse of the Ad Market

While the spending went on, the center of gravity of the ad market moved fast. Terrestrial ad revenue fell 56%, from about 1.9 trillion won in 2015 to about 800 billion won in 2024. Total broadcast advertising plunged 19%, from 3.0752 trillion won in 2022 to 2.4905 trillion won in 2023, and fell another 10.7% in 2024 to 3.0252 trillion won. Over the same years, mobile advertising kept growing, taking 77.8% of all digital advertising as of 2023.

The shift in media consumption shows up in the data. In Korea Communications Commission surveys, YouTube usage among OTT platforms rose from 66.1% in 2022 to 71.0% in 2023 and 72.7% in 2024. The share of people using only paid broadcasting fell from 39.5% in 2021 to 30.8% in 2024, while the share using only OTT rose over the same years from 39.8% to 52.4%. Weekday TV viewing time dropped 24 minutes, from 162.2 minutes in 2019 to 138.1 minutes in 2023. In a Korea Press Foundation survey, the most-used OTT was YouTube (71.4%), followed by Netflix (19.1%).

Even so, the JoongAng Group kept investing in content. Through the drama house SLL JoongAng (formerly JTBC Studios), it held to the bet that content would eventually become global competitiveness. But voices in the industry pointed out that advertising and sponsorship had become less an expense judged by effect or ROI and more "a kind of insurance to keep relationships."

Diversification Beyond the Core, and Its Results

The JoongAng Group kept looking for ways out beyond newspapers and broadcasting.

Logistics built on newspaper-delivery infrastructure was one. In May 2020, through its subsidiary JoongAng Ilbo M&P, it moved into last-mile delivery based on micro-fulfillment centers (MFCs), using the roughly 1,138 delivery hubs across Seoul, the metropolitan area, and the provinces that it had set up for newspapers. It drew attention as a play on the reach of that delivery network, but there is little clear evidence it later became a core revenue source.

In the same stretch, Contentree JoongAng kept acquiring in content and space. It bought the US drama house wiip in 2021, but performance was weak. In 2022 it bought the Playtime Group, which runs space businesses such as kids' cafés, for 125 billion won and contributed it in kind to Megabox, and that same year put 54 billion won into HLL JoongAng for a luxury and lifestyle business. Megabox also tried new businesses tied to its core, turning some locations into ice rinks. Each had a diversification logic on its own. Together, they worked to swell Contentree JoongAng's net borrowings.

In 2025 it entered the out-of-home (OOH) ad market. The JoongAng Ilbo bought the digital-advertising division (Town Board) of KTis, a KT Group affiliate, for 53.2 billion won, picking up elevator-TV ad media in roughly 3,650 apartment complexes and some 67,000 units. The calculation was to make money by bundling it with existing OOH, digital, and print products. Earlier, in 2023, it had taken over the Samseong-dong outdoor-advertising rights held by affiliate Megabox JoongAng for 15.2 billion won, steadily growing OOH revenue itself. Some raised concerns that the OOH market was being reorganized around media companies, and that the line between sponsorship and advertising could blur.

The largest diversification was the cinema chain, Megabox. Contentree JoongAng bought the entire Megabox stake in November 2020, but COVID-19, starting around the same time, cut cinema admissions by 80% to 90% from pre-pandemic levels. Megabox JoongAng posted operating losses for six straight years, from 2020 to 2025, with annual deficits running from 8 billion to 70 billion won. At the end of 2025, its total liabilities were 852.2 billion won against total equity of 38.5 billion won, pushing its debt ratio to 2,212%. Parent company Contentree JoongAng also sharply raised loans to keep Megabox afloat, from 25.2 billion won in 2024 to 168 billion won in 2025, and recorded a 2025 debt ratio of 317.8%. A merger with Lotte Cinema was floated. A merger conditioned on raising roughly 400 billion won from the private equity firm IMM Credit & Solution was reportedly pursued, but it fell through after the group could not meet the collateral terms the investor demanded. Megabox JoongAng ultimately filed for rehabilitation alongside Contentree JoongAng.

In leisure there is Phoenix JoongAng, which runs Phoenix Park in Pyeongchang and Phoenix Island in Jeju. At the end of 2025 the group as a whole posted a net loss of 442 billion won, and with Contentree JoongAng's 114.2 billion won in convertible bonds due the following year, the group moved to sell Phoenix JoongAng to Hanwha Hotels & Resorts. It was a decision made while a resort industry badly shaken by COVID-19 had still not fully recovered.

Looking for ways out through new businesses while the core wavered was, in itself, a reasonable move. But most of these businesses failed to generate the cash flow needed to prop up the group's finances in the short term, and instead piled up as another drain alongside the core. Contentree JoongAng's April 2026 talks to raise a 300 billion won investment from Ares Management, which reportedly fell through, sit on the same line. Along the way, inter-affiliate lending and guarantees stacked up until the whole group carried the risk of each individual business. Some ask whether internal checks, the kind that inspect financial risk at the group level in advance and put a brake on the pace of investment, worked as they should have.

The Splitting of the General-Programming Ecosystem

After the Korea Communications Commission approved general-programming channels in 2010, each settled into the market with a different strategy. TV Chosun caught middle-aged and older viewers with trot auditions like "Miss Trot" and "Mr. Trot," and built a low-cost, high-rating model with political talk shows like "Strong Hearts." Meshed with YouTube's recommendation algorithm, those talk shows became the ground from which conservative political YouTubers grew. There is analysis that a loop formed: they grew their influence through YouTube donations, then reappeared on general-programming current-affairs shows. In that process, political-content consumption on both the left and the right split further apart.

JTBC took a different road. In 2020 it declared its editorial direction "rational progressivism," and rather than the low-cost model built on trot and political talk, it concentrated on high-cost original content like dramas and variety shows, plus sports rights. That set it apart on content. It also left JTBC carrying structurally heavier production costs than the other general-programming channels.

What Remains

The industry reads the JoongAng Group's crisis as a move from a growth era that built scale into a period when aggressive investment stood out. Because of its standing as one of Korea's flagship media groups, the sense that "this is no chaebol to worry about" lasted a long time. The actual finances sat far from that reputation.

The collapse of the print market and the structural shrinking of broadcast advertising are, of course, problems for Korea's whole media industry. Broadcasting revenue fell for two straight years, from 19.7579 trillion won in 2022 to 18.832 trillion won in 2024, and Megabox JoongAng's troubles are not separate from the slump across the cinema industry, CGV and Lotte Cinema included. The belief that good content will be recognized in the end, and the hope that digital transformation and paywalls would offset the crisis in the core, did not belong to the JoongAng Group alone. They were premises spread widely across the Korean media industry.

That said, the criticism that the group invested in sports rights, content, and diversification beyond the stamina it could carry is also clear. Right after the rehabilitation filing, the fallout came fast: trading in Contentree JoongAng shares was suspended, and KakaoPay and TossPay disappeared from Megabox's online payment options.

In a moment like this, it is also worth noting that the social standing of the journalist's job is not what it once was. There are certainly cases where the conduct of some outlets and some reporters deserves criticism. But it is also true that many reporters in the field still put real time and effort into reporting and writing.

The trust JTBC built with its 2016 reporting on the state-power scandal, and drama IP like "SKY Castle" and "The World of the Married," are still assets worth money. Vice Chairman Hong Jung-do has said the rehabilitation procedure is "not to wind the company down, but a decision to adjust the debt burden and fundamentally normalize." Given the place the JoongAng Group and JTBC have held in Korea's media industry, how this crisis is resolved touches not just one group but the diversity of the country's whole media ecosystem. What form the group takes after rehabilitation, and which assets and content strengths it can defend along the way, is what to watch next.