Comments from Members of the Open Newspaper Committee (3)

Negligence of editorial responsibilities

By Akira Tamaki, Freelance Journalist

These types of stories would have never appeared in the printed edition of a newspaper. I think that these stories were run because the Mainichi Daily News (MDN) is an online newspaper.

The Internet has a function of turning information into just another piece of information. On the Net, newspapers, weekly magazines and personal blogs are deprived of their individuality and arranged horizontally as simple information. The writer of the column in question was caught up in the atmosphere of the Internet and quoted magazine articles that were based on underground culture and were obscene. The writer then posted such articles on one of the media outlets of the Mainichi Newspapers, which is the publisher of a general newspaper. The staff writer in this case was processing information rather than writing stories.

The qualifications of the staff writer who did such a thing should be called into question. I don't think he is a properly trained journalist. I wonder if he has sufficient knowledge about the Japanese media. Some of the magazine articles he quoted were not properly researched. Proper newspaper reporters would never have been so unprofessional as to copy magazine articles and post them in a media outlet operated by a newspaper.

There are also problems with the in-house system, in which the problem had been overlooked since the column began to appear on the Internet. It is beyond my comprehension why it had been left entirely to the staff writer's discretion to write and check his own stories, even if he was the chief editor.

The most important function in a newspaper is the desk editor's function of instructing staff writers and checking their articles. The desk editor is in charge of what and where staff writers cover and how they cover these stories, and instructs them to gather further materials if necessary. I wonder why an editorial department that lacks this important function was left as it is over such a long period of time. The organization of the editorial department must be reviewed with these problems in mind.

Representatives from various divisions at each newspaper regularly gather and discuss how the day's pages will be made. This also functions as a checking system. Through their long experience, newspapers have built up a system in which individuals cooperate in an organized way instead of working in an isolated manner. This enables them to automatically check articles through an organized system. I want the Mainichi to make full use of such a system.