DPRK Today

DPRK Today was a North Korean state-controlled news and propaganda website operated by the Pyongyang Moranbong Editorial Bureau. Launched at dprktoday.com in late 2014, it published news, photographs and video in Korean, English, Chinese and Russian and developed into one of North Korea’s principal externally oriented online propaganda platforms. The site was hosted outside North Korea, including for years on infrastructure in China and later on servers operated by European hosting provider Contabo.

DPRK Today became closely watched because it sometimes carried material not appearing elsewhere in North Korean state media. In 2016 it attracted international attention for propaganda videos depicting a nuclear strike on Washington and a rocket attack on South Korean government buildings in Seoul. The same year it published a commentary by Han Yong Mook, identified as a Chinese North Korean scholar, praising US presidential candidate Donald Trump and urging American voters to choose him rather than Hillary Clinton. In September 2020, DPRK Today announced a partnership with the Brazilian pro-North Korean organisation CEPS-BR, the Songun Policy Studies Center.

DPRK Today ceased publishing on 11 January 2024, when it went offline simultaneously with several other North Korean propaganda operations directed primarily at South Korean audiences, including Uriminzokkiri, Arirang Meari, Tongil Voice and Ryomyong. The shutdown followed Kim Jong Un’s decision at the end of December 2023 to fundamentally revise North Korea’s policy towards South Korea, redefine inter-Korean relations as relations between two hostile states and dismantle or reform organisations responsible for inter-Korean affairs.

Subsequent developments reinforced the conclusion that the shutdown formed part of a wider political and institutional retreat from North Korea’s former reunification policy. The Central Committee of the Democratic Front for the Reunification of Korea formally dissolved itself in March 2024, explicitly citing the new doctrine towards South Korea. In May 2026, Chongryon, the pro-Pyongyang organisation representing Koreans in Japan, also removed references to Korean reunification from its rules. These organisations were institutionally separate from DPRK Today, but their restructuring reflected the same broader policy change that preceded the website’s disappearance.

State Media Monitor treats DPRK Today as a closed outlet. No DPRK Today editorial content has been available through its website since January 2024 and no successor operation under the same name has been identified. As of August 2026, the dprktoday.com domain still resolves but displays only a generic web-server default page rather than DPRK Today content. The evidence therefore points to the termination of the media operation rather than a continuing temporary outage.

Former classification: State-Controlled Media (SC)

Offline: January 2024

August 2026