User:Brother Mal

Malcolm W. Adams

Inducted into The 2021 Omaha Press Club's Journalists of Excellence Hall Of Fame on September 17, 2021.

Mal Adams’s brilliant career has spanned the gamut starting as a broadcast journalist in Omaha and now as an entrepreneur in Japan. The Omaha native graduated from Central High School in 1967 and was hired as a reporter/photographer at KETV Channel 7 in 1969, his sophomore year at Omaha University. Adams was only the second Black to report on air in Nebraska TV history and was the first to anchor a regular daily newscast in Nebraska. He also hosted an award-winning program called “Rap About It,” which gave a voice to Omaha’s minority community. Adams first went to Japan in 1976 as a news anchor for KNX radio in Los Angeles. In 1981, he became the TV/radio correspondent for the Tokyo bureau of CBS News. Adams helped to start the Cable News Network in Japan and in 1984 produced and hosted CNN’s new series, “This Week in Japan,” which featured interviews with celebrities and government leaders. He interviewed four U.S. presidents – Nixon, Carter, Reagan and George H.W. Bush. Adams created Totown, the first Black-owned record label in Japan, and expanded it into a lucrative enterprise known as Totown Communications Group Japan. An icon in the field of cross-cultural corporate communications, Adams’s company now includes expertise in digital media, a media arts lab, an international academy, and yes – Mal’s Bar. Adams has received the Maejima Prize, Japan’s equivalent to the Pulitzer Prize in journalism. He is the only non-Japanese to have received the award. Now 72, Adams still lives in Japan and has four children and six grandchildren.