The daily Asahi Shimbun has forced a 46-year-old reporter to leave the company for secretly recording a conversation with a news source and giving a copy of the recording to another source.
Asahi officials said the reporter from the city news section had promised the source that it would be off the record.
The reporter, who quit the paper Thursday, copied the conversation to a mini disc and gave it to another source who was critical of the original source, the newspaper said.