Kyodo Today

Kyodo News

Kyodo is a nonprofit cooperative organization run on an annual budget, primarily made up of membership dues and revenues from nonmember subscribers.

Kyodo's Japanese-language news service is distributed to almost all newspapers and radio-TV networks in Japan. The combined circulation of newspaper subscribers is about 50 million.

Kyodo's English-language news service reaches news agencies, newspapers, radio-TV broadcasters and financial information distributors in various parts of the world as well as international organizations, including the WTO, IMF and IOC.

The English members' site of Kyodo News is web service with charge. The members' site provides some 300 real time news items a day in politics, business, crime and accidents, science and technology, sports and other news categories, especially those from Japan and Asian countries. It also provides you with various feature stories.

Members are able to search (or retrieval) archived news in English for 3 years and photos with English captions via easy searches.

Kyodo News International (KNI)

Kyodo News has a U.S. subsidiary, Kyodo News International, Inc. (KNI), based in New York. It was founded in 1982 as a marketing and research arm of Kyodo News.

KNI's mission is to supply timely and accurate political, financial, business, city and cultural news, mainly of Asia and the Pacific Rim, to non-Japanese media. KNI now provides major newspapers, TV broadcasters, financial services, online databases and government agencies with more than 200 news reports daily.

Recently KNI has made Kyodo's news pictures available via Internet-based online photo database. Kyodo has a huge photo library: 12 million frames, covering three million items. With these resources, Kyodo is able to provide a unique service to magazines, book publishers, newspapers and advertising agencies throughout the world.

K.K. Kyodo

Kyodo News has an affiliate, K.K. Kyodo News, which was established in 1972 as its business arm. K.K. Kyodo News is an information provider active not only in Japan but elsewhere in the world. It has at its disposal wide varieties of news, photos and other audio-visual material.

Newsgathering

Kyodo has some 1,000 journalists and photographers. More than half of them are posted at the Tokyo head office, assigned to political, financial, business, city, sports, science and cultural news desks plus various government offices and business organizations. Others work at five regional offices and 48 local bureaus across the country.

For international newsgathering, some 70 full-time correspondents and 40 stringers are posted at 50 places outside Japan. News coverage focuses on the Asia-Pacific region, where some 50 staffers, including local employees, are posted at 19 places. The second largest concentration of correspondents is in North America, followed by Europe, the Middle East, Latin America and Africa.

Additional news, amounting to some 1 million words a day, comes from more than 70 foreign news agencies with which Kyodo has news exchange arrangements. Kyodo has been a member of the Organization of Asia-Pacific News Agencies (OANA) since its founding in 1961 and has close links with some 30 other members of the regional organization.