What does the media say about the creative economy?: A topic modelling of private sector media narratives in Thailand and Korea

Information from the abstract

South Korea is widely recognised for leveraging its creative industries as key instruments of soft power. Thailand, inspired by Korea’s success, has made similar efforts to expand its creative sector to strengthen national influence. But what themes characterise the media narratives in both countries? What are the differences in the conceptualisation of creative industries and their links to soft power in the two countries? This study addresses these questions by analysing Korean and Thai news articles from 2014 to 2024 using structural topic modelling (STM), which identifies dominant topics in each country’s corpus and traces how their prevalence changes over time. The findings show that Korean media narratives are more consistent and temporally patterned, with recurring emphasis on technology, startups, innovation, and global expansion. Thai narratives, by contrast, show weaker temporal trends and remain more strongly centred on tourism, cultural heritage, and local entrepreneurship. These results suggest that while Korea and Thailand share similar soft-power ambitions, Thailand’s soft-power potential rests on a different set of creative-economy strengths. Rather than simply emulating the Korean model, Thai creative-economy policy may need to build more deliberately on its own cultural and institutional strengths. The study contributes by showing how media narratives can serve as indicators of national creative-economy priorities and the role of the private sector in soft-power development.

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Related topics: Computational and Text Analysis Methods · Asian Culture and Media Studies · Cultural Industries and Urban Development