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.
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