Early signs are good for the new AP Pyongyang.

So I finally found a minute to read Tim Sullivan’s piece in National Geographic, and it’s actually quite good:

In the parking lot, though, as we slid open the door to the van that ferries us everywhere, the monks reappeared. A minder was beside them. All looked at us expectantly. Then the older monk spoke. “I know what you want to ask,” Zang Hye Myong said.

Suddenly it was obvious why the monks had followed us. Minders do not introduce journalists to dissidents, and Ryongthong was no enclave of political critics. It was, as I should have known all along, a temple of totalitarian fakery, a movie set in which the stone steps and ornate wooden doors were barely worn. The monks were actors in a theatrical performance about North Korea’s religious freedom.

We were the audience.

So I grumbled the question they were waiting for: “Are you free to practice your religion?”

The monk looked victorious. “Westerners believe it is not allowed to believe in religion in my country.” He shook his head sadly. “This is false.” He was proof, he said, of the freedoms given to Koreans by the “Great Leader” Kim Il Sung and now protected by his grandson Kim Jong Un. He looked directly at me to make his final point, as if he’d been practicing the line: “I want you to take the truth to the world.”

But the truth is rarely simple in North Korea.

And newly anointed Bureau Chief Eric Talmadge’s report on the Masik Pass Ski Resort isn’t bad, either:

Who will ski here? Perhaps Kim Jong Un, who reportedly enjoyed the sport as a teenager studying in Switzerland. By the estimate of the ski official, Kim Tae Yong, there are only about 5,500 North Korean skiers in this country of 24 million — a skiing population of 0.02 percent.

Even so, as he sweeps his hand over the scene, the official displays no doubt that what his country really needs right now is a multimillion-dollar ski resort in the secluded depths of North Korea’s east coast. Kim bristles at the suggestion Masik will be a playground for the nation’s elite and a trickle of eccentric tourists.

This, he says, is his country at work. It is proof of the great love of the great leader.

It’s a little early to conclude that things are turning around at AP Pyongyang, but a least for now, AP reporters are exposing obvious fakery, asking obvious questions, and even providing a small amount of useful information.

None of this answers lingering questions about AP’s dealings with Pyongyang and what those dealings may say about the objectivity of its coverage, but at least these two stories don’t beg those questions quite so loudly as the howlers it served up last year.