East Windup Chronicle: Japanese Sports Dailies — A Scoop of News, A Scoop of Nonsense

Mac takes a look at “Japanese Sports daily newspapers and the way they cover baseball.”

I am not nearly old enough to remember what things were like in the United States fifty years ago, but if the Max Mercys and flashbulbs in the movies and the colorful prose of old articles are any indication, it was very similar to the current situation in Japan.

At least one reporter and one photographer from each of the national sports dailies is at every baseball event, including team practices, individual workouts, and tryouts. For example, Sports Nippon sics nine reporters on the Hanshin Tigers. They dance around topics and ask the same question a few different ways in order to exhaust every angle of anything resembling news. They race not to the pay phone with a roll of dimes but to their tiny typepads to fire off the latest scoop before someone else does.

Ideally, this is what reporters the world over should do with newsworthy items. However, the nature of Japanese sports publications demands that the writers have something to write about every single day at press time. The pressure to have something better and more interesting than the other reporters is very heavy and very real.

This leads to a watered-down product that is full of filler stories, wild speculation, gossip, and nonsense. There are some great stories within these papers, but one must sift through the debris that clutters page after page.