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Civic Engagement Projects
Journalist’s Success for Whom and for What?
Yohtaro Hamada
Asahi Shimbun
What are our measures of success as a reporter in Japan? This is a question that has haunted me since the very first day I became a reporter 11 years ago. Looking back retrospectively, I understand why I was compelled to think through this question; as soon as I understood the conventional ways to measure success of a reporter, I was convinced that I would never be a much of success’. This realization ultimately has driven me to become interested in the ideas of public journalism.
I believe that it is worth the effort to contemplate this question as I hope to introduce ideas of public journalism into the newsrooms in Japan. One of the reasons that civic journalism have failed to resonate with many members of news media may be attributed to the fundamental differences in the notions of success between public journalism and journalism as practiced in our news rooms day in and day out.
I made a lousy start at the local bureau where I was first assigned. My beat was two police precinct stations in the metropolitan area of Sendai, one of the bigger cities located in northern Japan with population just about a million.
In Japan, all the newly recruited reporters start out covering police, writing a bucket full of stories about crimes, accidents and arsons. It also has a meaning of initiation because covering the police is tough. Members of the police force are the most secretive bunch. They are not nice. They don’t want to talk to the reporters. You are expected to penetrate through the barrier and cultivate your sources within the police stations.
Here, you are instilled with a first creed of police reporting; be first with a story. Don’t get your competitors break a story before you. Anything happens with those two stations I cover become my responsibility. It’s a simple game. Any story I break with these stations become my point (we call it Tokudane, meaning an exclusive story). Any story my competitor breaks loses me a point (Tokuochi, meaning being scooped up). The beauty of police beat is that it is very easy to know who won the game. If there is a story on my competitor’s paper starting like “ The South District Police Station has identified Mr. John Doe as a prime suspect…” and I did not write a same story yesterday, the editors in my bureau can easily conclude that I lost because I do not have as good of sources as competitors. Little room for any excuse.
Every morning, I started my day flipping through four different newspapers trying to find out if there was any story I should have written and did not. After a while, “South District Police” and “East District Police” automatically popped up from the pages, because only the stories with this set of word mattered to me because they determined the quality of my life.
Once I was not quick enough to follow up the story my competitor broke, I was literally yelled at by the leader of police beat; “don’t you realize how big of a shame you lose?” her voice screamed through the phone. After a couple of painful experiences, I learned to become defensive, paying very close attention to the activities of my competitors; “Aren’t they spending too little time in the press club? They might be cooking up an exclusive story. I should go check my sources”.
Once I asked a senior reporter what’s the meaning for doing all this. He said “ well, if it is a game. The only way to have fun is to win it.”
After a year of this ‘initiation’ period, I was released from the police beat without scoring any major ‘Tokudane’. My editor probably thought I was no use for beat reporting. So I became a reporter without any specific beat. Relieved from the pressure to be first with a police story, I, for the first time, was given a chance to think freely about what is newsworthy.
During this tenure, I did many projects on my own. One of them was about the food allergy. Some people, especially infants and youth, are allergic to certain kinds of food ingredients, most commonly eggs, but could be anything like rice or bread. It had already become a major concern for many parents. I received the tips from a few parents, doctors working at neighborhood clinics and an owner of a grocery shop. For example, there is a problem of school lunch. Their kids must avoid eating foods to which they are allergic but the schools were not very cooperative in that kind of efforts. There was no formal discussion on this topic in the city hall or school districts. No press release. No high profile lawsuit by affected parents. In short, there was nothing that captured the attention of reporters who cover the local government beats.
However, that was the first time more than a few readers responded to the story I wrote. There were a handful of letters and phone calls. Some of them thanked me for recognizing their ordeals with food allergy. Our competitors had not taken up this important topic before me. I was first with it. Did this story qualify as ‘Tokudane’? The answer was no.
I then learned that ‘being first’ is not good enough to be categorized as ‘Tokudane’. First, you did not get the story from the sources within the bureaucracies. Second, our competitors did not follow up on it. My story did not qualify as a ‘success’ as a result of peer review, even though the largest number of readers seemed to resonate with it than with any other stories I had written in my short career.
After serving as a prefectural bureau reporter for 4 years, I was transferred to the Tokyo headquarter and have worked in a business section and a newly created ‘Section for Civic Welfare’. This experience has made me more acutely aware of my discomfort with the notion of success defined by the traditional journalists.
As a business reporter, I was back on the beat reporting again. This time, the battle field was the Ministry of International Trade & Industries. Or more precisely, the press club of MITI.
There, the measurement of success was pretty much the same as the police beat. ‘Be First with Your Story’ was the dominant theme. The difference with the police was that the MITI officials are more media savvy, meaning that they are willing to use the news media in order to achieve their own goals. In so doing, they cleverly utilize the nature of news media to their advantage.
Once I received a call from an official whom I had got along fairly well. He asked me to come down to his office and gave me what looks like a couple pages of document and explained that MITI just decided to give ‘go ahead ‘ to a company to generate and sell electricity to industrial consumers. At the time, MITI was trying to liberalize the electricity market and encourage anyone other than the traditional power companies to jump in the business of selling electricity. “I only gave it to you”, he said. That was the magic word, and he knew it would make me jump on it.
So I did. I wrote the story of “ this epoch-making move by MITI in the history of energy policy” and it played well with our business section editor. The story was provided a large space, much larger than it would have had if it were given to all other news organizations at the same time.
The important point was that I scored a point because I was first with the story and I got it from a bureaucrat whom all the reporters consider an authentic newsmaker. It pays off to make friends with as many officials as possible.
Every year in June, there was a sort of contest within the major press clubs covering the ministries on how much insider reporters had become. The game is simple. June is the season when most of personnel transfers take place within the ministries. A reporter who could most accurately speculate who would make the higher offices for next year wins. It was considered a valuable victory because personnel transfer was the sensitive area in which most of officials have intense interests, but refuse to discuss. If you are not an insider enough, you cannot get any information. If your speculation proved inaccurate, that is considered a major blunder. One reporter actually shaved his head because his shot at who would be a next vice minister was wrong.
Being able to get critical information from bureaucracies at a critical timing is important ability for a reporter. However, in too many cases, it becomes an end itself.
For example, the major responsibility of a beat reporter who covers National Tax Agency ( equivalent of IRS ) is to break a story on tax evasion by politicians major corporations and celebrities. Tax evasion is the only kind of story that would win him/her a point. Once, I was surprised to hear the beat reporter who unabashedly said he would not be too critical with the agency because he “had to get information” from the people who work in it. This beat is considered one of the toughest because there is no official outlet of information on tax evasion cases. No press release. No press conference. You just have to get to know the officials well enough and win their trust enough to get information. Siding with taxpayers does not help much. Nevertheless, these reporters who cover the tax agency and the Prosecutor’s office are considered ‘tough guys’ and enjoy special status within the newsroom because the people they cover crack down on ‘the big bad foxes and wolves’ in our society.
There is one other reporter who covers a policy-making aspect of taxation in the press club of Ministry of Finance. Then again, the only way he/she scores a major point is to be first with the story on major revisions on the tax codes decided by the politicians and officials. The revisions are decided in the series of special meetings scheduled every year in November and December. This beat reporter is called ‘seasonal worker’ because he/she is only busy for a few months during which the special tax meeting is session.
Then, what kind of reporter should be working as a watchdog for the taxpayers? Why do we only write about tax evasions and political battles fought for preferential tax treatments by interest groups? A chance for me to address this question came when I was transferred to ‘the Section for Civic Welfare’ about two years ago.
I wrote stories about the number of people who file tax returns had been rising rapidly in recent years in order to claim tax refund. (In Japan, most of the people are not obliged to file an income tax return, which makes many people pay little attention to how the tax system works and changes.) As soon as the story was printed, about 20 people quickly responded and wrote e-mails and letters explaining their experiences of filing tax returns. A retired professor expressed his anger with strict restrictions on tax deduction of donation money. A mother was surprised at how much she claimed back by filing her tax return voluntarily for the first time.
These are real people who are willing to share their real experiences with our newspaper. Then, I interviewed them and wrote a few more stories based on their experiences while providing information on the pertinent tax codes. I also made an argument that the most crucial timing for tax reporting is March, when the deadline of filing tax comes. This is when most of people think about tax and might deliberate on the larger issue of fairness in taxation. Similarly, I did a series of stories on the weird twist of social security system which has reduced many people’s old-age pension without being noticed. I got more than two hundred responses from the readers.
Did these stories win me any points? Our newspaper has a content review committee whose members come from outside of the news organization. I have heard that they liked my stories. However, my work was pretty much ignored in the peer review done by the members within the newsroom. So I concluded. I have to look for a different measure of success.
After all, didn’t I come in this career to do service with the public? Then, it seems more logical to measure my success in terms of public service my works render instead of ‘points’ I might earn as a worker within the organization. Thus, my journey searching for ‘public’ journalism has begun.
© Copyright 2001 by YourSITE.com
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