Site: Nihon Keizai Shimbun, Inc. (Nikkei)
Electronic Media Bureau (EMB)
1-9-5 Otemachi
Chiyoda-ku, Tokyo 100-66, Japan
http://www.nikkei.co.jp/enews

Date Visited: 23 March 1998

WTEC Attendess: M. Shamos (report author), T. Ager, L. Goldberg

Hosts:

• Koji Hayashi, General Manager, Electronic Media Bureau
• Shunsuke Nittsu, Deputy General Manager, Electronic Media Bureau
• Tomomi Tsubota, Manager, News Bureau Development
• Takashi Habara, Deputy Manager, Multimedia Editing Department
• Shigenori Eto, Multimedia Editing Department
• Michitaka Sekine, Multimedia Editing Department

BACKGROUND

Nikkei has been a financial newspaper company for 122 years. It is famous around the world for the Nikkei Average of leading Japanese stocks and is roughly comparable to Reuters or Dow-Jones. Its daily newspaper, Nihon Keizai Shimbun, is the world's largest financial daily, with a circulation of three million. It publishes four other newspapers, owns Nikkei Satellite News TV Tokyo and five other television companies, produces books and magazines, and sponsors large-scale cultural events.

The company views itself as a reporting conglomerate with 1,400 reporters generating economic, business and financial stories that are stored and then disseminated through both print and electronic media. Having the first computerized daily newspaper in Japan, Nikkei owns the largest and oldest full-text database of Japanese news stories, complete since 1985 with some dating back to 1975. It has set a goal of increasing its profit from electronic sources to 20% within the next several years. Company managers believe that with low-cost dissemination methods such as the Internet, profit rather than revenue is the appropriate measure of success.

Nikkei employs 13 people directly involved in research and development in information systems and retrieval. Thirty more are employed in affiliated companies.

ELECTRONIC INFORMATION

Mr. Habara explained that Nikkei has the largest electronic information sales of any Japanese company by virtue of its huge historical database comprising over 1.3 million stories. Its in-house ANNECS composing system was inaugurated in 1972 and forms the basis for capturing its stories in electronic form. It is used in various stages of production and manages the 14 different editions of the paper that are produced daily. Reporters transmit their stories directly into PLES, a paperless editing system, by modem over telephone lines, if necessary, or through the Internet. The system produces voice output for proofreading, allowing verification of articles at high speed. The voice component was provided by NTT. The company is noted for the speed with which news stories that may possibly affect market prices can be transmitted to its customers, in some cases within a few minutes.

English materials are handled by NETS, a proprietary system for receiving and disbursing material in the Roman alphabet. Nikkei's software systems are specified by Nikkei but built by outside contractors, including IBM.

ONLINE SERVICES

Mr. Eto gave an overview of the company's electronic businesses. In addition to text databases, Nikkei has maintained a numerical database business for almost 30 years, selling corporate financial and stock price information through a service known as NEEDS. QUICK-IS provides data for analysis in personal computer environments. The services Nikkei Telecom 21, Nikkei Telecom, Nikkei Net and Nikkei Online offer news stories and summaries electronically in English and Japanese.

Telecom 21 provides full-text search in Japanese and English. Its fees are designed to promote large-scale usage. The basic subscription rate is ¥8,000 per month for a single user ($60 per month as of March 31, 1998). This goes down to ¥500 per month for each user ID over one hundred. With the basic subscription, headline reading is free, stories can be retrieved for ¥20 each ($0.16). A search hit on a headline costs ¥5 ($0.04). A variety of other usage plans are offered. Nikkei's Web site experiences ten million hits per day, three million accesses and over a hundred thousand billable transactions, making it the second most active Internet site in Japan. Chinese language capability has been considered but is not presently regarded as a profitable business opportunity.

Approximately 1,000 stories per day are added to the database by Nikkei reporters. At 2:00 a.m., the stories in the 14th and last edition of the newspaper (by now corrected, if necessary) are sent to the archive, which is stored on an IBM 3090 mainframe computer. No summarization or abstracting is performed. Nikkei points out that these operations are unnecessary because the stories are usually short and their editorial style is such that the lead sentence serves as an abstract. Dow Jones supplies 1,500 stories per day to Nikkei under a cooperative arrangement by which about 10% of the items are translated into Japanese, published by Nikkei and added to the electronic database. Numerous articles from other Asian newspapers such as the Straits Times (Singapore) and the Bangkok Post, as well as different Japanese newspapers, are added to the database every week.

Nikkei's corporate database includes information on over 200,000 Japanese corporations and over 18,000 other Asian companies.

In 1997, Nikkei, Mitsui and America Online (AOL) began a joint venture under which Nikkei became the largest supplier of information to AOL in Japan. Nikkei offers its services in tiered levels designed to fit the budgets of its customers. At the bottom level, AOL subscribers can expect to pay ¥3000-5000 per month. The next higher level is Telecom, and the highest level of numerical data is QUICK, which is now saturated.

The WTEC group was given a tour of Nikkei's demonstration facility, where we were shown full-text retrieval via AOL. (Full text is available, but only for selected stories.) Telecom 21 offers retrieval of text with motion pictures and sound in English and Japanese. Nikkei also make available other text databases under license from outside publishers. Collective search is possible. Stories of interest to a particular customer are downloaded to his PC each week so that local searching can be performed to reduce the load on the mainframes supporting the online service.

Nikkei's view of its databases is entirely proprietary. They are a revenue-producing asset of the company and are made available to others only for a fee through Nikkei services and interface software.