AJS luncheon series at Foreign Correspondents’ Club of Japan on April 21 welcomed as the guest speaker Mr. Peter Langan, the Bureau Chief of Bloomberg News in Tokyo. The series title is “Views of Foreign Correspondents in Japan”. Bloomberg is now the largest overseas news network in Japan. Mr. Langan has headed Bloomberg’s Tokyo bureau since August 2005.

Bloomberg News founded in 1981 by Michael R. Bloomberg provides the electronic newspaper of choice for the world’s business, financial and political community, faster and more accurately than any other organization, according to the company’s interpretation. Particularly last 3 or 4 years, Bloomberg has greatly expanded its news coverage in general news, beyond traditional strengths in financial markets, to politics, social issues, sports, art and culture, restaurant, museum review and more.

Mr. Langan worked for Nikkei in 1980, the time of Japan’s bubble economy, which he said was “certainly a very interesting time to be in Japan”. He Joined Bloomberg news in 1997 and while working in Singapore covered oil price collapse and Asian financial crisis. Mr. Langan said “Coming back to Japan was a great pleasure, because Japan looked “a real country to me.”

Explaining Bloomberg service, Mr. Langan said that it has the teams who follow stories regardless of what time and where. In Tokyo, although many news service bureaus are closing down, the electronic media is rising. Bloomberg news as the electronic media presents different forms of front pages for different readers. This means that it provides for the various readers the biggest news stories for the day for each.

Mr. Langan disclosed one of their works concerning North Korean development. Two new reporters Tokyo bureau had hired have been working on very commendable series of the area, staying in the refugee camp of the border region. At this window to North Korea, they got information from the defectors. Besides its famine problem, they found drugs being made in North Korea for export are developing quite a serious problem amongst the people itself. They also discovered that the demilitarized zone(DMZ) has now become a natural wild life habitat and that many environmentalists want to turn it to a peace park. However, he added, trying to write about North Korea had eventually failed because covering the information source was very difficult.

Mr. Langan made points on the listeners’ questions, as follows. China has a risk in future because people will become to want greater freedom. Tokyo is disconnected to the current Japan’s gloomy image because Tokyo is not Japan. The problem is the Parachute journalists who drop in the scene and scrape up only the surface of the story. Journalists have to get beyond the image and get in behind the story. Foreign journalists in Japan come to get more access to news resources, compared with before, but they still have a lot of hills to climb. They must be careful that Japanese companies’ public relation departments provide limited information. Foreign correspondents must keep pushing. What is required of journalists is curiosity more than anything else. “Remember that the goal of journalism is service for the public,” Mr. Langan stressed.

“Japan is by far the biggest reader in Asia,” Mr. Langan noted. “We can match our rival Nikkei by providing better service to Japanese readers with global contents. And it is clear the appetite is certainly here.” “Readers do not care where news comes from. All they need is news. So we provide,” was his conclusion.