Its sources inside North Korea communicate with the main office using Chinese cell phones,[8] while it also has several correspondents based in China who interview people coming and going across the Sino-North Korean border.

[14] There have been suspicions of the Daily NK, because of the US government-sourced funding, a known enemy of North Korea, and due to uncertainty about its accuracy and the use of anonymous sources which raises questions about how truthful the information is.

[26] Daily NK was the first news organization to obtain and published excerpts from explanatory materials regarding North Korea's "anti-reactionary thought law," which went into effect in late 2021.

[33] As Benjamin Siberstein of the Foreign Policy Research Institute has cautioned, "Daily NK and Radio Free Asia ... often publish stories based on a small number of sources inside North Korea.

"[8] Sewoong Koo, the founder of Korea Expose, has written that "Daily NK often relies on anonymous informers in the North to run critical articles about the regime, and its track record on accuracy is spotty at best.

"[35] Many high-profile experts on North Korea follow and have even expressed praise for Daily NK's work, albeit sometimes with caveats regarding the media outlet's sourcing.

Joshua H. Pollack, a senior research associate at the Middlebury Institute, has said on Twitter that Daily NK's reporting is based on "opaque sourcing" but "they have a pretty good track record.

"[38] Barbara Demick, author of "Nothing to Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea," has called Daily NK a "respected online newspaper based in Seoul.

"[43] Ian Urbina, the director and founder of The Outlaw Ocean Project, has called Daily NK "the best investigative-news venue related to North Korea.

While information from North Korea defectors is often used to make up for data shortages, using witness accounts and interviews has pitfalls, including sample bias (Mimura, 2019), limited means of verification and inaccuracy of memories (Song and Denney, 2019).

It is essential to bear these limitations in mind when interpreting the numbers quoted in this paper, which alongside official publications also draws to an unusual extent on press reports.