Senior Copy Editor, National News/Business Desk
I oversaw all national news and national business stories (hard news and features), as well as international news stories. My tasks routinely required heavy editing and major rewriting.The items I worked on were both for the newspaper editions, as well as special publications, and the daily news feeds to The Japan Times online. All work was performed under exacting, multiple deadlines. I also contributed to and helped compile the paper's style guide, adding Japan-specific components to augment the mainstay AP style.As a representative of the paper's national news desk, I also engaged in countless radio interviews, often live, with overseas broadcasters, ranging from various BBC outposts, to U.S. stations, including interviews with NPR's "Global Journalists," to those of Canada, and most European nations, the Vatican, and Oceania. Interview topics were widespread but greatly intensified after the March 2011 disasters and subsequent nuclear catastrophe.In the 1990s after The Japan Times acquired the radio station Inter-FM, (FM Interwave) I did a daily 5 p.m. live news report, called "Behind the Headlines," on major stories that were going to appear in the next day's newspaper. That routine lasted about three years, before the station was sold and relocated.Since July 1 I have been uploading, and tweeting, stories to The Japan Times online paper from the Seattle area, providing copy during the JT's staff down time.