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FOCUS: Personnel exchanges with IT enterprises being promoted+
(Japan Economic Newswire Via Thomson Dialog NewsEdge)TOKYO, Jan. 16_(Kyodo) _ (EDS: THIS IS THE FIRST OF FIVE NEWS FOCUS STORIES ABOUT JAPANESE NEWSPAPER COMPANIES)
In early June last year, Hideki Shono, 36, a reporter at the Tokyo branch of Nishinippon Newspaper Co., a major regional newspaper based in Fukuoka, received a shock when he met his superior at a coffee shop near the Finance Ministry, the beat he was covering.
Shono was told he would be sent to work for a while at Softbank Corp. as part of a personnel exchange program. He had thought the superior would be telling him his next beat after the Finance Ministry, and this was beyond his imagination.
The Nishinippon Shimbun and Softbank, a major information communication company that holds Yahoo! Japan Corp., a portal site, and others under its wing, introduced a system last summer to exchange employees, an unusual move for firms in different industries without capital relations.
The exchange program started last year when Softbank purchased the professional baseball team Fukuoka Daiei Hawks from Daiei Inc., a major supermarket chain operator in financial trouble.
The team was renamed Fukuoka Softbank Hawks. The Nishinippon also publishes a sports newspaper and had a long relationship with the predecessor baseball team.
Takao Kawasaki, 55, chairman of the business planning committee at the Nishinippon, said, "The newspaper's circulation has not been increasing, and it is hard to get advertisements. Newspaper companies are forced to tackle media other than newspapers. At such a time, a most advanced enterprise has come to us. It is also interested in Kyushu, and we talked about whether we can do something together."
In addition to Shono, the Nishinippon also sent a 28-year-old employee in the advertising section of the Tokyo branch to Softbank.
Softbank, meanwhile, sent to the newspaper company Kiminari Iwanaga, 29, a public relations official, for a one-year assignment.
Shono is in charge of new Net animation services at a subsidiary of Softbank, while Iwanaga is working as a reporter in the Editorial Department of the Nishinippon's head office.
What are the Nishinippon, with a history of nearly 130 years, and Softbank, the leading firm in Japan's information technology industry, going to produce? "We have no special intention. We would like the transferees to study. This is our mutual purpose. It is good if something is born," said Koki Tabe, 51, head of the public relations section at Softbank.
The Sankei Shimbun, a major newspaper, began to distribute its electronics newspaper Sankei NetView on the Internet in October last year, enabling personal computer users to read about 20 pages of the day's final edition.
Its selling points are a low monthly subscription fee of 315 yen and contents such as three-dimensional images and animations. Sankei asked Yappa Corp. of Tokyo, which has advanced technologies in the field, to develop the software.
The provision of news is the basic business of a newspaper company. At present, there are about 100 daily newspapers, including sports, specialized and English language papers.
Their combined circulation as of October 2005 was about 52.57 million, leveling off or slightly dropping off. The average consumption of newspapers per household is 1.04 copy and decreasing.
Is there no opposition to tie-ups with newly emerging enterprises?
Shizuo Kobayashi, 57, head of the Digital Media Department at the Sankei, said, "They have high technologies and ideas which newspaper companies do not have. They are also well-versed in behavior patterns of Net users. There is no problem if we take the initiative in making final judgments after hearing discu
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