The 'Dark Side' of K-pop?

It's the obtrusive management & PR making ridiculous demands

The above is a note a subscriber wrote when they upgraded from a free to paid subscription. (I am sharing this with their permission.) While I value all my subscribers — paid or otherwise — this was the first time someone included a note.

I have received short apologetic notes when people unsubscribed. Most said they didn’t have enough time to read the newsletter. But there was one that broke my heart. A daughter wrote to say that her mother had been a fan of my writing, but she had passed away. So they were canceling her credit cards and all of her subscriptions. They were so kind to fill me in when they were grieving and didn’t have to say a thing.

Anyhow, while that may sound like it has nothing to do with the thesis of this post that I promised in my headline, it sort of does tie-in. In the past, I have asked my paid subscribers what they would like to read as a bonus piece. The most frequent request I received was a variation of the message M. sent:

You have talked a little on Xitter about how frustrating it can be to get publicists to send jpegs for your articles. I’m curious if it’s the same dynamic with publicists for K-pop stars. If you could please go into that a little more if it won’t get you in trouble haha I would love to read that. Thank you for considering and thank you for all your articles.

My feeling is that everyone is trying to do their jobs. Some publicists are better than others. This post is not about the latter. This post is about how quick some of them are to throw you under the bus because they (most likely) got reprimanded by the group’s management over something. Anything. (I’ll get into that in a bit.)

I have no doubt that this publicist was ordered by the Korean label to make demands. She could’ve told them: There is no error to correct. This isn’t Korea and you don’t get to dictate how U.S. editors operate. But she didn’t. Instead, she chose to be condescending to me. And that’s on her.

With the most recent request from a K-pop publicist, I debated sending them a lengthy email explaining why they are wrong, or simply ignoring them (which is rude). I ended up compromising and answered their text with the following… (And, yes, I know. I can’t text. I am always hitting send before I’m ready to. But at least I didn’t make a typo this time.)

Before I go on, I want to remind you that in my 11 months that I’ve been writing my newsletter on Substack, only 2½ posts are behind a paywall. And that ½ that was accessible to paid readers only was tacked on as a bonus — the long K-drama review that preceded it was for anyone who wanted to read it.

I know that anything you put out on the internet isn’t private. However, my goal here isn’t to shame anyone, but rather showcase some of the frustrations that come along with writing about K-pop. Hence, no one will be named. And whoever you’re thinking this is about — it most likely isn’t. The only hint I’ll give is that the article has already been published. It’s water under the bridge as far as I’m concerned, but I refuse to be chastised like a child who needs permission to do my job.