Nippon press club allows foreigners p.

By: George Garneau

AFTER YEARS OF locking out foreign news organizations, the club that controls press access to Japan's Foreign Ministry in Tokyo has opened its doors to foreign reporters.
The Kasumi Club last fall changed its rules and admitted the Associated Press and Reuters as regular members.
It is the first of Japan's press clubs to give foreign journalists full status. The clubs, for the most part, limit membership to the 173 members of the Japan Newspaper Publishers and Editors Association (NSK), which does not accept non-Japanese media.
"We are very pleased with this important first step toward greater access to news sources in Japan," said AP Tokyo bureau chief Thomas J. Dygard.
Though other press clubs have granted "observer" status to allow foreign reporters into news conferences, background briefings, or kondan, and other events remain off-limits to non-members.
For years, foreign news organizations have complained about being excluded from everything from routine news conferences to off-the-record briefings. Critics also say the club's status as a cartel goes against the grain of competition and promotes soft coverage of government because journalists are loath to offend the officials who feed them information.
"It's absolutely appalling that the press corps in Japan could allow this to go on," said Matthew Winkler, Bloomberg Business News editor in chief. "What this really amounts to is restraint of trade. Our business is selling information in a timely way, including news about Japanese companies. If it's set up so we can't do that on a level playing field, obviously we are at a disadvantage."
Bloomberg, a 2-year-old New York-based business information service, has been pressing hard for entry to the Kisha Club, whose members receive news directly from Japanese corporations. Winkler, rankled because Bloomberg reporters are relegated to waiting on Kisha's doorstep for news, is calling for the control of news to be treated as a trade issue "because information is money," and giving it to the Japanese press gives Japanese investors an unfair financial advantage.
The National Press Club in Washington, D.C., and the association of foreign correspondents in Tokyo support opening the clubs.
When Sony announced its takeover of Columbia Pictures, only Japanese reporters were allowed into the press conference, said Winkler, whose agency supplies business news from 180 journalists around the world to 40 major papers for free as a promotion.