Aki Ito, currently the digital editor for the Bloomberg News global technology team in San Francisco, talks about going to the Tokyo bureau for three months as part of a job swap.
Ito writes, “The newsroom in Tokyo was so gracious to me. When I asked for things, hesitantly and apologetically at first, they never gave me a hard time. And as I started to get the hang of things, I found that there were a few things I could uniquely bring to the table as a young, female, gay journalist in a profession in Japan that’s ruled by seniority and dominated by straight men. I guided reporters through a couple of really interesting stories. Even the older journalists sometimes came to me for advice. And I was proud to speak at a company event about being a Japanese lesbian, in a country where the gay community is forced to be so closeted that even I had kept my identity a secret to many of my colleagues for years.
“Toward the end of my time in Tokyo, I was approached with another opportunity that was opening up back at home, in our San Francisco newsroom — to help lead the launch of a revamped online technology hub for Bloomberg. Once again it was a job for which I felt completely unqualified and unprepared. I almost declined it. But I remembered the three months I had just spent in Tokyo, how I eventually figured things out and how it made me think that I might be good at leading something.
“So I applied, and I’ve been in that role for almost two years now. For the first few months I was constantly overwhelmed and regularly mad at my manager for thinking that I was capable of handling so much responsibility. But now, I’m so proud of the work I’ve done to amplify the efforts of the incredible journalists we have on our team. I can tell you with 100 percent certainty that I’m a better journalist today than I was two years ago.”
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