Japan Media Review is an online-only magazine that will look at how emerging technologies are changing the practice of reporting in that country.
In its first issue, Jane Ellen Stevens dissected the state of the country's web and found many similarities - and some notable differences - between online journalism there and in the west.
Japan is one of the most newspaper and television-friendly countries in the world, with national dailies Yomuri and Asahi each employing more than 2,000 reporters and editors. As a result, many still consider the web to be a second-rate news medium.
As in the west, most of the big news players launched web sites in the mid 1990s, with their own small, separate reporting staffs. Now many of these sites are updated round the clock, but most newspapers have moved their web counterparts back into the newsroom and the web-only reporters are gone.
The only newspaper currently making money on its site is Nikkei Shimbun, Japan's equivalent to The Wall Street Journal. It charges US$50 for a six-month subscription to Nikkei Net Interactive.
The threat of losing paying readers to the web is a critical issue in Japan, because papers there get about 50 per cent of their income from subscriptions. Big newspaper publishers are now looking to cell phones as a way of making money which is unique to the web.
Almost 60 million of the country's 72 million mobile phone users now also have wireless web access. This has proved to be a goldmine for The Yomiuri, which was the first big paper to reproduce its web content for phones. Only six staff work for cell phone news services, but they make the company about US$100 million annual profit.
Sources:
http://www.ojr.org/japan/about/1043967363.php
http://64.87.25.234/japan/media/1046029646_3.php
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