Tokyo, early Monday morning, I was flipping between Japan’s news shows. Typhoon Dujuan dominated all the networks and there was so much happening on-screen that you’d be forgiven for thinking that the feed into the hotel’s cable system had somehow merged a gameshow and an air traffic control screen, with a side helping of mid-80s TV home shopping. Japan’s morning news shows have little to do with the sofas and news desks of the Australian and US versions of Today, Good Morning America or anything on the UK’s breakfast telly buffet. Rather than the industry-standard double anchor plus newsreader and weather sidekick, Japan’s commercial networks like their studios big and bright, their presenters young and abundant (at one point I counted seven in the studio) and their infographics delightfully analogue – cue lots of cardboard cut-outs, pointers and handmade graphics.
After flipping between three networks, I got the general idea that the typhoon wasn’t going to hit Tokyo directly but that things would be rather wet and blustery at about 17.00. I was about to head out for a lap of the Imperial Palace when TV Asahi cut away from the studio to some thrashing palm trees on an island south of Tokyo. As the camera swung around between the rooftops, crashing waves and bendy palms, a young correspondent (21 years old? 23 max) wearing a white safety helmet with a chin strap and technical rain gear filled the screen and relayed what was happening. A few moments later we were on another island and an equally young female reporter was teetering in the gusts, drenched, drawing attention to a sad-looking swimming pool that looked like it had been abandoned about 20 typhoons ago. Next it was back to the mainland for a series of live hits and, no matter the location, there wasn’t a single person north of thirty clutching a microphone and delivering commentary about the angry typhoon.
Was this unique to TV Asahi? I quickly flipped through the other channels and, sure enough, potentially dangerous weather assignments belonged to battalions of cub reporters. While CNN, the BBC and so many others leave the dramatic stories to their most seasoned correspondents, this isn’t so in Japan, where a significant weather event required reporters and crews to get into position a day or two earlier, waiting (hoping) for the winds to whip up and for tiles and wall panels to start flying. I ended up sticking with the coverage longer than planned, before getting completely side-tracked by an amazing advert for a new premium service from Japan Rail (more on that from our Tokyo team later in the week) but eventually I made it down to street level and trotted around the park. As I passed the Tokyo FM building, I thought about all the young reporters out covering their stories and wondered what happened to the ranks of news cadets and cub reporters in Western media organisations. Have they disappeared for health and safety reasons? Is it wholly inappropriate to use the word “cub” in relation to a young journalist? Have legal departments deemed it a mental-health liability trap to send the potentially vulnerable and inexperienced out to do the job that they applied for?
On Friday I had lunch in Hong Kong with my former boss from the US network, ABC. We hadn’t seen each other for 36 years and, over bites at Grissini at the Grand Hyatt, we took an all-too-brief tour down memory lane, touching on the opportunities that we were offered and the risks that we took in the world of network TV news circa the 1990s. ABC didn’t call its news juniors cub reporters but its bureau on London’s Carburton Street certainly felt like a special, well-financed finishing school for young journalists. Thank you, Lisa, for giving me a shot all those years ago – even if I didn’t get a white helmet with a chin strap.
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