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| Yoichi Nishimura (photo by Yang Shaogong) |
Japan’s newspapers expanded their role of serving the community by using social media in the Great East Japan Earthquake of 2011.
Yoichi Nishimura, former managing editor of Asahi Shimbun, with daily circulation of 8 million, said news organizations cooperated to share information about missing persons with a Google database so families could find loved ones.
“For the first time, there was a large-scale joint effort between social media and the traditional mass media,” Nishimura told an audience at Tsinghua University in Beijing. The news media spread disaster-related information through social media such as Facebook and Twitter.
New journalism training
For Nishimura, one of the lessons of the earthquake was to reinforce the importance of news media in creating community.
People in the central areas of the quake were searching for reliable information as they had no TV or Internet access due to power outages, and their cell phone batteries were dying out. When the newspapers were delivered to the evacuation shelters, people practically scrambled to obtain them, some in tears as they read.
Here, the newspapers functioned to allow the evacuees to feel that they were indeed a part of the rest of society. As a source of information, the newspapers were part of the lifeline, just like electricity, gas and water.I received a letter from one reader that said, “When I read the Asahi Shimbun by candlelight at the evacuation shelter right after the earthquake, I felt a connection with the rest of the world.”
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