For years, the online newspaper JanJan News mounted a scrappy challenge to Japan’s blandly conformist press, offering articles written by readers that took on taboo subjects like whaling and media collusion with the government. But the site never attracted enough readers or advertising and was finally forced to shut down most of its operations two months ago.
JanJan was the last of four online newspapers offering reader-generated articles that were started with great fanfare but that have closed or had to scale back operations in the last two years. And it is not just the so-called citizen journalist sites that have failed.
No online journalism of any kind has yet posed a significant challenge to Japan’s monolithic, sclerotic news media.
‘‘Japan just wasn’t ready yet,’’ said JanJan’s president and founder, Ken Takeuchi, a former reformist mayor and newspaper journalist who started the site in 2003. ‘‘This is a hard place to create an alternative source of news.’’ While Japan’s long stagnation has prompted a slow dismantling of the nation’s postwar order, punctuated by a historic change of government last year, the news media have so far been left relatively untouched.
Changes
The new government has taken initial steps to open up the exclusive press clubs that dominate coverage at a handful of central ministries but has yet to follow through with more sweeping changes.
For a variety of reasons, cultural as well as economic, the digital revolution has yet to wreak the same havoc on the news media here that it has in the US and most other advanced economies. The media landscape is still dominated by the same handful of behemoths that have held sway for decades, giants like ‘Yomiuri Shimbun’, the world’s largest newspaper, with daily circulation of more than 10 million.
Personal blogs thrive in Japan, as do shopping sites and chat rooms appealing to groups including pet lovers and angry nationalists. But sites dedicated to news have found only a small foothold, and most of those are run by major news outlets, which often treat them as sideshows.
Most glaringly, there have been few of the alternative, online news blogs and news sites that have appeared in other countries, like theHuffington Post in the US. The handful of sites that have drawn attention, like J-Cast News and The Journal, have failed to garner large numbers of readers.
Citizen journalism has earned the most attention here, largely for taking the lead in challenging media taboos and criticizing press clubs. But they are far from prosperous. A well-financed startup from South Korea, OhmyNews Japan, shut down two years ago, and Tsukasa Net closed last November.
Takeuchi and others in online media point to a number of reasons the sites have failed, beginning with advertising revenues that are too low to support even a skeletal newsroom.
But it also appears that Japan, with its familiar cultural disdain for those who stick out from the crowd, may be inhospitable terrain for the reader-turned-reporter model, Takeuchi said.
OhmyNews revolutionised the South Korean news media with reader-generated stories that challenged the conservative big newspapers, and in 2002, it helped elect a liberal president, Roh Moo-hyun. The site has become a powerful media force, with 62,700 readers-turned-reporters and two million page views a day, in a population a third the size of Japan’s 127 million.
But when OhmyNews took its winning formula to Japan, it flopped. Ad revenues never materialised, the site drew a meager 4,00,000 pages views a day and just 4,800 readers signed up to write stories, said the site’s former chief editor, Masahiko Motoki.
Motoki and others say that another reason for Japan’s resistance to alternative sites is the relative absence there of social and political divisions.