Professor Side’s “Not in the Textbook” PR Course, Vol. 7 | News Agencies
Hello, I’m Professor Side.
Starting this time, I will be discussing news agencies as our theme.
News agencies are indispensable to delivering news. In Japan, Kyodo News and Jiji Press are the leading news agencies. The “local newspapers” discussed in the previous session could not function without these news agencies. For many local newspapers, it is not financially feasible to maintain numerous reporting bases outside their prefecture. They purchase out-of-prefecture news—namely national and international news—from news agencies and publish it in their pages.
These two leading news agencies have many reporting bases not only in Japan but also overseas, and they cover all kinds of news. They also partner with AP, AFP, and Reuters—the world’s three major news agencies—thereby covering news from around the globe.
Many of the stories on Yahoo News are also distributed by news agencies and published there.
You may often see captions such as “AP–Kyodo” in newspapers or on television; this means that Kyodo News verified a story reported by AP and distributed it.
The types of news include not only disasters, politics, and the economy, but also so-called soft news such as fashion, music events, and trends. These stories are distributed by news agencies not only as articles and photos, but also as videos. In this sense, news agencies could be described as comprehensive news trading companies that combine the functions of a newspaper company and a TV station. From a PR perspective as well, they can be said to be institutions of great significance as gateways for disseminating information domestically and worldwide.
Kyodo News and Jiji Press each have bureaus in every prefecture. Especially for companies headquartered in regional areas, they are media organizations that present a major opportunity to have information distributed both domestically and internationally. By analyzing the characteristics of news agencies and trends in the news they distribute, you can gain clues about what becomes news. Please make a point of looking for news agency stories in TV and newspapers.
