Online Newspapers Scale Back in Japan

Ken Takeuchi, founder of JanJan, at its empty office in Tokyo in May.

TOKYO: The headline told it all: “Ink Gushes in Japan’s Media Landscape.” Online newspapers in Japan have closed or scaled back their operations during the past two years. The New York Times correspondent Martin Fackler wrote in a June 21 dispatch from Tokyo:

“For a variety of reasons, cultural as well as economic, the digital revolution has yet to wreck the same havoc on the news media here that it has in the United States and most other advanced countries. The media landscape is still dominated by the same handful of behemoths that have held sway for decades, like the Yomiuri Shimbun, the world’s largest newspaper with daily circulation of more than 10 million.”