The Asahi Shimbun counts about 2,500 journalists spread across four central newsrooms (Tokyo, Osaka, Nagoya and Fukuoka) and about 300 regional newsrooms. The new reform has “borne both hope and worries,” says Ono, because it is designed to establish “a new form of news that better matches readers’ needs and thus to forge a new way,” but it also worries journalists who now work on unfamiliar topics. According to Ono though, the reform will not lead to any redundancies.

Why is the Asahi Shimbun going through these reforms?

We’ve always found the composition of newspaper sections to be a problem, because more and more topics cannot be categorized according to the sections. For example, energetic issues relate to the ‘Politics’ section as much as they relate to the ‘Economy’ or ‘International’ sections. It’s the same problem for topics about the media, which extend beyond the ‘Society’, ‘Economy’ or ‘Science-Health’ sections. If each section is constrained to its nominated subject, it risks bypassing an important event that lies somewhere in the middleground between two sections. As a result, we realized the necessity of changing our system to represent the changes of the society we cover.

What are the differences with the new structure?

The first stage of the reform related to the flexibility of the sections, by introducing a grouping system. The ‘Society’ section was replaced by the ‘Society’ grouping, the ‘Politics’ section was replaced by the ‘Politics’ grouping, and so on. Until then, every different section was represented in a newsroom, and every journalist was assigned to a particular section.

In the new system all journalists are assigned to the newsroom and each contributes to a working group formed around a particular topic. This will enable us to be more flexible in our configuration depending on the social context and the topic that interests our readers. This way we will target news that reflects society more precisely and more profoundly. In line with this idea, we have witnessed the birth of new groupings that relate to topics our readers want to learn more about: the ‘Education’ grouping, the ‘Health’ grouping and the ‘Work’ grouping. The creation of these groupings was based on the requests and suggestions of our readers. The main participants are journalists who used to be assigned to the ‘Society’, ‘Daily Life’ or ‘Science-Health’ sections.

Next September, we will launch a second stage of the reform to transform, through reconfiguration, the three groupings of our Tokyo newsroom (‘Politics’, ‘Economy’ and ‘International’) into four groupings: ‘Foreign Affairs-International’, ‘Politics’, ‘Economic Politics’ and ‘Business-Finance’. The ‘Foreign Affairs-International’ grouping will merge a national point of view and the growing diversity of international news, in order to report news from both perspectives.

The second reform was meant to reinforce editorship. We introduced the following in the Tokyo newsroom in Spring: there are now two editors-in-chief. The general editor leads the editorial aspects of the newsroom. The general manager takes care of management, as well as journalist training and assignments. We have generalized this system to all newsrooms so that editors from each grouping are under the responsibility of the general editor. ‘Editors’ are now the directors of each grouping. With the reform, editors’ responsibility towards investigations and content is more focused, which will enable the implementation of well-defined perspective based on continuous investigative pieces.

To what would you compare your reform?

Our reform is similar to that of the European Union, which is currently furthering its integration. If nation-States only act out of their own will, they won’t keep up with globalization. Europe is trying to build a structure that allows flexible problem resolution, while also easing its border control. We too, try to take down walls between sections that used to be shuttered because of their autonomy, in order to facilitate the free movement of journalists.

Source: Hirohito Ono, foreign editor Asahi Shimbun