2018 Volume 7 Issue 1 Pages 37-54
This study identifies the news production process of investigative reporting at a local newspaper as a case study, which is the report of Kochi Prefectural government financing under cover by the Kochi shim-bun. It received the Japan Newspaper Publishers and Editors Association Prize in 2001. This study identifies the process from the phase of basic research that gets a clue for news and the phase of expansive research, to setting up the news first by interview to journalists.
Especially, this study focuses on an editorial right that is pointed out as structural problems for Japanese mass media, and discusses how the executives with editorial rights affect the news production process.
The findings are that the journalist made an effort to manage information, selected interviewees carefully and avoided sharing information in his company because of apprehensiveness of intervention by executives. Moreover, executives proposed some conditions, postponed reporting the news and presented an alternative plan because of the risk of reporting. On the other hand, journalists asserted executives to report, responded to the conditions which executives proposed and used the pressure outside of the organization.
This study is single case study and interviewed only journalists. However, this study found that editorial rights affect the news production process empirically as Ishikawa (2003) and Hanada (2013) pointed out. Further studies are needed in order to generalize. This findings suggest that it is important not only to focus on journalist's news gathering activities, but also to focus attention on interaction between reporters and editors in the organization for improvement of quality and quantity of investigative reporting.
