A short bus trip brought us in the morning to the Tokyo head office of the national newspaper Sankei Shimbun. Sankei is number five in circulation among the large national newspapers. It was founded in 1933 and has a daily circulation of 1.7 million in the morning and 0.55 million in the evening (Osaka area). It comes in four editions for the Tokyo area and in five editions for the Osaka area including the evening paper.
The media company publishes other titles as well, among them a targeted newspaper for young professionals. Magazines, special interest papers, radio and TV as well as online publishing are also part of the company's program.
Printing is handled in eight plants with 26 press sets. Four of the sites are based in Tokyo and four in the Osaka area. Sankei is the only national daily that can print 32 pages in full colour. One site can even reduce the width by nine centimetres if required, which is rare in the Japanese market. They introduced a high frequency screen ruling, called ECO screening, which doubled the line screen from 100 to 200 lines per inch. Due to increased dot gain they now can save even 10 to 15% of ink.
Currently a new newspaper production system is implemented to enable content management for the multi-media age managing all kind of media content, like text, pictures, graphics, audio and video. The plan is to integrate and centralise everything in 2010 in the Tokyo head office. A new layout system is part of this major overhaul. By June this year, ten new systems should be up and running.
The aim is to have a news-centric system orientation workflow, providing one source and multiple use. The concept was presented to different manufacturers and finally developed with those expert companies. The future will not only allow sharing content but also sharing human resources for publishing in different media and using different channels. The reporter develops over time to become an editor.
Sankei Digital runs five web sites with 47 million users and 740 million page views recently. Its mobile business includes 32 news services for the three most important cellphone communication providers.
