News Sources

The Nishinippon Shimbun

The Japan Times, Asia Times Online, and the BBC online

The London Review of Books

PN Review, and other magazines

Many of the essays on this site deal with topics in the news, and with matters touching on current events. With this in mind, a few words are in order about the sources I draw on to collect facts and form my opinions. Sometimes I despair about ever being able to use it properly, but I maintain a clipping file of articles mainly drawn from the sources I discuss here; as I write this, it seems to be hovering at about three thousand woefully under-indexed pages. This growing bulk of research material will be the subject of at least one future essay on indexing. At present, I propose to run through a list of the publications that I read every day, with a brief mention of what makes each one particularly valuable to me.

For about a year I subscribed to the Daily Yomiuri – the Yomiuri Shimbun’s English language daily – but we recently changed to the Nishinippon Shimbun (roughly, the ‘Western Japan Newspaper’). The Daily Yomiuri is a fine paper that seems to be meant for American business people living in Japan, and also for Japanese business people who wish to study English. It carries feature articles from several American newspapers, and, on Sundays, from The Independent. Over time, I began to feel starved for local news, and the Nishinippon Shimbun is our major local newspaper. It also operates a publishing imprint that has produced a number of interesting books about Fukuoka and Kyushu history, including the only book of Fukuoka history in English: Chris Flynn’s Faces of Fukuoka (1999). The local focus is what makes the Nishinippon Shimbun worth reading; its national and international news is mostly drawn from wire services, and apart from the sumo coverage – which is perfectly adequate – I am indifferent to the sports. Weather is a tricky topic in Japan – we have impressively changeable weather here – and although the newspaper is a fine source of general weather information, you can get more accurate information from the Asahi Shimbun’s internet edition. The Asahi’s weather page is impressively detailed, and features a radar map of current rain fronts which is updated every couple of hours.

Overall, I have never been impressed with the internet as a reliable source of news and commentary – given that most web pages are unedited and infrequently maintained – but many reputable publishers now produce valuable internet editions of their publications. The Japan Times has the best internet edition of any Japanese English language daily, with the Yomiuri Shimbun close behind, and the Asahi Shimbun respectably bringing up the rear. The Yomiuri’s internet edition recently developed the annoying habit of failing to adequately mark dates on its copy, and the Asahi, while effectively indexed and arranged, is updated only spasmodically. It seems that the Japan Times takes its internet edition seriously, and it is the only one among the big three that can claim to be a daily newspaper of equal strength in print and online. Many people use the Japan Times for its extensive Monday employment advertisements; you will not find these in the internet edition. They have recently begun to carry a selection of online advertisements for executive positions, but the job offers for English conversation teachers are only in print. For news from outside Japan, I read the internet editions of The Times and The Independent – via their headline e-mail services – and regularly check the BBC. The BBC deserves high praise for continuing to provide a ‘low graphics’ version of their web site. I appreciate the fact that one small part of the internet continues to be analogous to radio and not to television. Asia Times Online is, as far as I know, only available online; it is well worth reading as a source of everyday news and insightful editorials from – generally – an Asian perspective. They also reprint analysis and commentary from other sources, ranging from Chinese and American current affairs magazines to the CIA.

I currently subscribe to The London Review of Books and to three magazines: The Spectator, History Today, and PN Review. Of the four, two are more or less specialist periodicals: PN Review is a poetry magazine, and History Today is devoted to the popularization of historical writing. All four represent a wide range of opinions and points of view – without lapsing into incoherence. In the past, I regularly bought and can still recommend Archaeology, Foreign Affairs, Foreign Policy, The Economist, KMT (an attractive magazine on ancient Egypt), and Arts of Asia. I love to collect a variety of moderately specialized magazines, but they tend to pile up in lonesome, unread heaps in corners of the living room, and the more specialized they become, the harder to get and the more expensive they are. My current subscription list is short enough that I can usually wade through them without falling behind.

There is a practical side to all my flipping and clipping: the only really effective way to learn how to write and to edit is to read widely and constantly. It is not enough for us to stick with our own work, or to read only one or two magazines or novelists we admire. I suggest an overworked metaphor: to swim in the oceans of English prose, in waters both pleasant and distasteful. One tries to avoid the distasteful waters, of course; but in this case it is helpful to first identify what one later wants to avoid. None of the sources I mention here fall into the ‘distasteful’ category; but they all – sometimes – offer up a selection of common or uncommon errors and less than apposite usage that proves both instructive and informative. Most of the time, however, they are pleasant to read: as conscientious guides to the news and examples of well made English prose.

2002/05/29

Date posted: 2003-09-01