K-campus student reporters tour Kakao's main office, meet with representatives

Students in the Korea JoongAng Daily's fourth K-campus student reporter program visited Kakao's headquarters in Seongnam, Gyeonggi, on Friday.

K-campus student reporters and mentors pose for a photo at Kakao's office in Seongnam, Gyeonggi, on Friday. [KOREA JOONGANG DAILY]

Students in the Korea JoongAng Daily's fourth K-campus student reporter program visited Kakao's office in Seongnam, Gyeonggi, on Friday.

The student reporters toured the office, also called Kakao Agit.

Students visited the company's lounge and cafe areas where employees work, along with the online e-commerce platform Kakao Shopping Live's studio and the Kakao Friends store on the company's campus.

The company's public relations team also gave a presentation about Kakao's subsidiaries and businesses to the student reporters, with many of them asking questions they had when using Kakao's services in everyday life.

Questions regarding the messaging service KakaoTalk were the most common, with a student asking if it had plans to allow users to delete chats after the current limit of five minutes and why such a limit was implemented.

"We [set the five-minute limit] because we think of KakaoTalk chats as an actual real-life conversation," a Kakao spokesperson said. "If we let users delete chats a long time after the conversation was made or not show the deletion record, it would be like taking away part of a conversation without the person on the other side knowing about it."

Regarding questions about the snowing animation in KakaoTalk chatrooms — only visible when it's actually snowing — and how the company is notified when to turn on the animation, the spokesperson said an actual employee switches on the feature after manually monitoring if it snows or not.

K-campus's student reporter program offers journalism mentoring and helps them produce articles for the Korea JoongAng Daily and K-campus. With many student reporters being international students, the program also features company tours to help them get an understanding of the Korean job market and work culture.

Visiting students are part of the Korea JoongAng Daily's student reporter program, which offers journalism mentoring and helps them produce articles for the newspaper and K-campus. With many student reporters being international students, company tours are arranged to help them get an understanding of Korean companies.

K-campus is an online platform for international students offering guidance on life in Korea, run by the Korea JoongAng Daily.

BY LEE TAE-HEE [lee.taehee2@joongang.co.kr]