Asahi Shimbun offers free digital news access to middle and high schools

Asahi Shimbun is launching a campaign to provide its digital edition, “Kyozai Course for Students,” free of charge to middle and high schools across Japan through March 31, 2027. The offer is limited to the first 50 schools that apply by December 25, 2026.

Participating schools must use the service for educational purposes and agree to cooperate with surveys and interviews to help improve the service. Each school can request up to 1,000 individual IDs for students and teachers. The digital course includes unlimited access to paid articles, a newspaper viewer for the past 90 days of full-color editions, and a searchable archive of articles dating back to 2014.

Following the trial period, the service will transition to a paid model. The standard rate for the educational course is 33 yen per student per month, typically requiring a minimum of 250 users.