Ko Nokagawa

Nokagawa knows, believes in newspapers and future

By CHARLYNE BERENS

A Tokyo native leaves Japan to earn a journalism degree in Nebraska. Then he returns to Tokyo and winds up working at an English language newspaper in Japan.

All that crossing back and forth between cultures and languages seems to have worked well for Ko Nakagawa, a 1976 graduate of NU’s news-editorial program. His current project for Asahi Shimbun, a Japanese media conglomerate that employs 7,000 people, is to redesign the Asahi Evening News. Nakagawa hopes to have accomplished that goal by April 2000.

Just a little more than a year ago, Nakagawa was busy coordinating coverage of the winter Olympic Games in Nagano. In that process, he supervised the staff for Asahi’s Japanese and English language publications — about 20-25 photographers and 70-80 reporters.

He admits he’s become something of a “special projects” person for Asahi, perhaps because he’s done some of everything in his journalism career. He had earned a college degree from Chuo University in Tokyo before coming to Nebraska, where he was admitted as a junior. After graduation from NU, Nakagawa returned to Tokyo as a picture editor for the Associated Press. He spent six years with AP, some of that time as a reporter and editor.

Then he joined Asahi, where he was assigned to a local bureau at a city north of Tokyo. He followed the police beat, reported on business and politics, served as photo editor and page-makeup editor during his stint at the bureau. Nakagawa remembers those years as some of the most interesting of his career, giving him a chance to try lots of different things.

The combination of that experience and his U.S. journalism education has helped him advance to his current level of responsibility, Nakagawa said. Few colleges or universities in Japan offer journalism programs. Instead, people who want journalism careers earn degrees in other areas and then are hired and trained as journalists by a newspaper. It’s a very competitive atmosphere, Nakagawa said. He thinks his journalism degree from NU helped him advance through the ranks at Asahi.

He came to NU thinking he wanted to be a reporter, Nakagawa said, but got interested in photojournalism after taking George Tuck’s beginning photo J class.

It wasn’t love at first sight, though. In fact, Tuck recalls that Nakagawa almost failed the beginning course, largely because he didn’t put in the time and effort required. “When he showed up to take advanced photo J, I told him I thought it was the wrong class for him,” Tuck said. “He assured me he’d changed, gotten direction and made a commitment to photo J.”

It wasn’t an empty assurance: Nakagawa earned an A in the advanced course as well as A’s in the color photography and photo documentary courses, Tuck said.

But Nakagawa says he learned plenty in his other classes, too. “I think I got a good preparation here” for all the varied journalism jobs he has held, he said.

Nakagawa visited Lincoln in December 1998, during a business trip in the United States. He said is worried about the future of journalism, especially the future of newspapers.

“I hope young people come up with ways to improve it,” he said, ways to stop sagging circulation and dwindling readership. “Newspapers are really important for citizens,” he said.

Whether information is delivered on paper or on line, “people are still interested in the news,” Nakagawa said. But journalists must work to present the news in a way that makes it accessible and appealing.

He predicted that media will continue to converge and cross over the traditional barriers between print and broadcast. Asahi, for instance, has affiliated television and cable channels as well as on-line editions of its newspapers, and its reporters are expected to be able to produce in more than one medium.

“Being a journalist is not just limited to one medium,” Nakagawa said. “The concept of being a journalist is changing.”

That’s true on both sides of the ocean and in many languages and cultures. Take it from a journalist who has learned and worked in several.