INMA 30 Under 30: Ryo Namiki of Nikkei

By Paula Felps

INMA

Nashville, Tennessee, United States

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In September 2024, INMA awarded 30 young professionals around the world with its fifth “30 Under 30” award as part of its Young Professionals Initiative. This is the sixth in a series of 30 features about the impressive rising media stars who are shaping our industry.

At Nikkei, Ryo Namiki specialises in data journalism and visual journalism, which allows him to leverage his expertise on engineering and design.
At Nikkei, Ryo Namiki specialises in data journalism and visual journalism, which allows him to leverage his expertise on engineering and design.

When an 8.9 magnitude earthquake rattled eastern Japan in 2011, it had unexpected consequences for Ryo Namiki: “[It] deeply affected my family living in Sendai,” Ryo said. “This sparked my interest in natural disasters, leading me to study computational geoscience at university and graduate school.”

After completing graduate school, Ryo entered the media industry, where he has focused on disaster reporting, international reporting based on open-source intelligence (OSINT), and coverage of generative AI. At Nikkei, where he began working in 2021, he specialises in data journalism and visual journalism, which allows him to leverage his expertise on engineering and design.

“One of my significant contributions was an article on the Great Kanto Earthquake, a devastating earthquake that struck Tokyo nearly 100 years ago,” he said.

The article, which used visual storytelling and data visualisation to relay historical events and explain current and future challenges, was shortlisted for the 2024 Society of Publishers in Asia Awards and received the Jury Award from the Japan Typography Association in 2023.

The engineering and design skills he has honed are serving Ryo well as a journalist and will become even more important as digital technology evolves. His work to acquire practical OSINT skills, such as analysing satellite images and social media data, have been used to go deeper with his reporting, such as writing a series of articles on the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

“Ryo is an exceptional data journalist with outstanding analytical skills and is acquiring design skills for data visualisation,” said Joshua Ogawa, managing editor of the Visual Journalism Center at Nikkei. “We need compelling content for our subscription-based model, and Ryo’s work is critical … his fearless approach to challenging big questions is invaluable.”

Ryo also contributes to the industry by encouraging new talent to enter the field of data journalism, and he aspires to establish Nikkei’s investigative journalism team as “the best intelligence team in East Asia.”

The need to develop reporters who can use OSINT to report on disinformation campaigns is becoming more urgent, he said, particularly for Japan, which is surrounded by the authoritarian states of China, North Korea, and Russia: “It is essential to develop and scale our data journalism efforts,” Ryo said. “I aim to establish Nikkei as an indispensable source of information in the region.”

He is doing that in many ways, leading by example and encouraging others to explore new possibilities through expanding technology.

“Ryo positively influences both younger colleagues and veteran journalists in our newsroom, fostering a culture of innovation and continuous learning,” Ogawa said.

About Paula Felps

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