Newspapers Facing A Crunch

[Mulboyne]

The headline on the right of this Shukan Diamond poster refers to a looming disaster for the Japanese newspaper industry brought on by the huge increase in information available through the internet. The full story will appear on the new edition of the magazine on sale from Monday. Most articles about a newspaper crisis have up until now referred to problems with the ethics of journalism but this is specifically about a structural problem with the economics of the industry. The individual sections of the piece talk about how the home distribution model for newspapers has collapsed and some distributors have been accused of resorting to illegal selling tactics. The Asahi is looking at the possibility of falling into the red as newspaper readership declines and Diamond believes that the company is looking at cooperating with the Nikkei and the Yomiuri to find a way for the industry to cope with a radically new world.

[gkanai]

I wonder when the Nikkei will realize what the NY Times realized today, that advertising from the archives of an online newspaper is more lucrative than a subscription service.

[Mulboyne]

Here's confirmation:

AFP: Japanese newspapers announce tie-up to combat threat of Internet

Three of Japan's leading newspapers said Monday they would cooperate in their online productions and distribution, joining hands to maintain clout in an industry under threat from the Internet. The tie-up involves The Yomiuri Shimbun, which is considered the world's top-selling newspaper, along with its liberal arch-rival The Asahi Shimbun and the Nikkei business daily. The three newspapers will set up a new website with their articles posted next to one another, partly in an attempt to lure younger readers to subscribe to their print editions. "We want to increase the influence of newspapers in the world of the Internet," Asahi Shimbun Co. president Kotaro Akiyama told a news conference. Nikkei Inc. president Ryoki Sugita said that most news now found online came originally from newspaper journalists. "The largest purpose is to help readers realise the role of newspapers seen in the Internet media," he said of the alliance. "Through the new project, we hope Internet readers will also read newspapers," said Sugita, whose newspaper sells three million copies each morning.

The three media giants will also cooperate in distribution in regional areas, especially the Yomiuri and Asahi dailies which respectively sell over 10 million and eight million morning copies each day. The alliance came as the newspaper industry faces difficulties in maintaining Japan's extensive home delivery system, particularly in remote areas where the population is dwindling. Japan is one of the few developed nations where newspaper circulation is not going down, a trend often attributed to home delivery which has long secured loyal readership. "Japanese newspapers have maintained credibility partly because the papers are sure to be delivered to homes through the distribution system," said Hitoshi Uchiyama, president of The Yomiuri Shimbun Holdings, which publishes the centre-right daily. "One of the purposes of the partnership is to keep the system in mountainous, remote areas," Uchiyama said. The companies also plan to share printing factories and distribution networks in cases of disasters.

[Mulboyne]

Here's an odd decision which makes life even more difficult for newspapers:

Japan Times: Bizarre ruling against newspapers

The Tokyo District Court recently ruled that three newspapers libeled a doctor at Tokyo Women's Medical College Hospital by publishing a wire service report. But it acquitted the news agency that dispatched the article. This bizarre ruling carries the danger of greatly hampering newspaper reporting activities.

Akita Sakigake Shimpo, Jomo Shimbun (in Maebashi) and Shizuoka Shimbun had published a July 2002 Kyodo News article about the death of a 12-year-girl following a heart operation at the hospital in 2001. The doctor who performed the operation was arrested by the Metropolitan Police Department and charged with professional negligence resulting in death. His criminal trial continues in Tokyo High Court.

On the basis of a study by the university's fact-finding committee and a news conference by police officials, the article had hinted at the possibility that the doctor mishandled a heart-lung machine. In May 2003, however, the Japan Association of Thoracic Surgery and other organizations issued a report stating that a filter in the machine had clogged.

Deciding that the main part of the Kyodo article was untrue, the district court said the three newspapers cannot avoid being taken to task for wrongly believing that the article was accurate even if it was dispatched by a reputed news agency like Kyodo. It also pointed out that since they did not carry the Kyodo credit line for the article, it appeared as if the newspapers had written the article. The court thus ordered that they pay compensation of \1.1 million to \1.65 million.

In principle, local newspapers commonly use news agency dispatches in the belief that they are accurate. If the dispatches are incorrect, news agencies should take responsibility. The court ignores the established practice of newspapers and news agencies.

The court acquitted Kyodo News because it found sufficient reason to believe that the police announcement and the committee's findings were true. Yet, what the court is saying is that the news agency cannot be legally blamed for the article while the newspapers can. Does this make any sense?

[Doctor Stop]

This is the key point:

Deciding that the main part of the Kyodo article was untrue, the district court said the three newspapers cannot avoid being taken to task for wrongly believing that the article was accurate even if it was dispatched by a reputed news agency like Kyodo. It also pointed out that since they did not carry the Kyodo credit line for the article, it appeared as if the newspapers had written the article. The court thus ordered that they pay compensation of \1.1 million to \1.65 million.

Kyodo should now sue Akita Sakigake Shimpo, Jomo Shimbun, and Shizuoka Shimbun for not giving them proper credit, and possibly even copyright infringement.

Double whammy.

[Mulboyne]

Asahi: Fit to print

A recent court ruling sent shock waves through the nation's media by ordering three regional newspapers to pay damages for printing a wire service story it found libelous while exonerating Kyodo News, which transmitted the story, from any payment. The Sept. 18 ruling by the Tokyo District Court in connection with alleged medical malpractice found no malice in the agency's reporting. Rather, it said the news agency had every reason to believe its allegations that a doctor's poor handling of a heart-lung machine caused the death of a 12-year-old girl were true. Media organizations and industry watchers slammed the ruling, saying it could undermine the foundations of wire service news distribution, on which regional newspapers depend for many of the stories they print. The ruling raised the question of how far newspapers should be held accountable for verifying facts in wire stories--a tough call for small, regional entities. It also brought into focus the media practice of not printing credits for wire stories on domestic matters.

The three papers--the Shizuoka Shimbun, the Jomo Shinbun and the Akita Sakigake Shimpo--did not use a Kyodo credit in printing the story. The libel suit revolved around the death of the girl after a heart operation at Tokyo Women's Medical University in 2001. The doctor, who in a district court ruling was found not guilty of professional negligence resulting in death, filed a defamation suit against the July 2002 Kyodo story. Prosecutors have appealed the ruling. While acknowledging the story was inaccurate, the Tokyo court determined that Kyodo had sufficient reason to believe otherwise due to accounts given by police and the university. But it said the regional newspapers "did not have grounds to believe the story was accurate other than the fact it came from a well-established agency." It, thus, did not acknowledge the principle of "wire service defense," under which newspapers that simply carry wire service stories are exonerated from responsibility. The newspapers, ordered to pay 3.85 million yen in total, filed an appeal on Sept. 25.

Regional newspapers depend on news agencies such as Kyodo for much of its coverage of the central government and news of other regions. Kyodo has a staff of around 1,700. About 80 percent of its revenue comes from membership fees from 57 media organizations, including Japan Broadcasting Corp. (NHK). Since regional newspapers cannot afford to check and verify all stories they print, Kyodo is supposed to shoulder responsibility when litigation and other legal disputes arise. Kyodo said of the defamation ruling: "It (the court) did not understand the news distribution functions of a wire service. This organization cannot accept the ruling." Jiji Press, another major domestic news agency that has contracts with 140 media organizations, called the ruling "extremely regrettable."

While the principle of wire service defense is widely acknowledged in the United States, lower court decisions in this country have been divided. But a January 2002 Supreme Court ruling set a precedent. It said a newspaper should not be exonerated from responsibility for carrying a libelous story simply because it was provided by a reliable news agency. Its ruling was in connection with a libel suit filed by a man at the center of a high-profile murder case, who was eventually acquitted of the shooting death of his wife in Los Angeles in 1981. Still, the top court's third petty bench said such decisions must be limited to private citizens' crimes or scandals. In a related case, the court's second petty bench gave a similar ruling in March 2002, but a dissenting opinion said it could violate rural residents' right to know if newspapers feel intimidated. The ruling on the Kyodo story followed the top court's precedent of not recognizing the principle of wire service defense.

The Niigata-Nippo newspaper criticized it in an editorial. "Unlike ordinary reports on crimes, stories on medical malpractice must be regarded as having greater public benefits," it said. "The ruling fails to weigh public benefits against the gravity of personal honor that was damaged." The ruling also took issue with the nation's long-established practice of not using credits in printing wire service stories. It said it cannot apply Kyodo's arguments to the three newspapers because they printed the story as if it were their own. Under contractual obligations, newspapers are required to print a Kyodo credit for each Kyodo story they use. But for domestic news, Kyodo has tacitly approved the practice of not using it.

Yoichi Kitamura, the lawyer for the doctor accused of medical malpractice, says that without a credit, readers cannot judge where the story originated. "In many U.S. rulings, the use of credits is a premise for approving wire service defense," he says. A senior editor of a regional newspaper says the use of credits in more than half of its stories would be "cumbersome." Other newspapers say the ruling prompted them to review their editorial policies on printing credits. Yasuhiko Oishi, a professor of media law at Aoyama Gakuin University, says although the ruling did not fit the media reality, the wire service defense amounts to "logic only for insiders." "Newspapers are not just information services but organs of speech," he said. "They have taken too loosely their responsibility for showing to readers where stories originate."

[Kuang_Grade]

A senior editor of a regional newspaper says the use of credits in more than half of its stories would be "cumbersome"

.

It would be no more cumbersome than inserting the wire service text into the paper...it would likely be more cumbersome for their readership to realize that a majority of their newspaper content is created by outside third parties and not by the newspaper itself.

[Mulboyne]

[Kuang_Grade]

That Japan Today piece makes my head hurt...It starts off like a piece on Iraq that transitions to the status of cheese manufacturing in Wisconsin in the second sentence...what does this newspaper site have to do with TBS and Rakuten? Nice to see McKinsey using a 8 year old definition of RSS too, as well as ignoring that making money with RSS is far from easy. And some of us old farts don't bother with RSS and still just use bookmarks as well.

Combining several papers into one website makes sense to me, if only to minimize the cost of developing multiple sales staffs selling for smaller single paper websites. More than a few US newspapers threw down huge amounts of cash to develop their own sites to see almost nothing in returns for years and years ...only in the last few years are newspaper sites are actually recovering more than their actual costs and although much of their reportage costs are still assessed to the newsprint side. Many papers tried to integrate online and print sales teams for joint selling, which was often a very costly and ineffective way to approach advertisers-many of which were usually only interested in one type of advertising, and if not, usually it just segmented the initial buy between online and print without actually increasing revenue collected.

To me the bigger question is how 'fresh' is news on the site going to be...Are they are going to hold back posting stories online for a few hours to give print a nominal time advantage or if they are just going to roll print and online content out at the same time?

[Mulboyne]

AFP: Japanese newspapers announce tie-up to combat threat of Internet

Here's the site

[Mulboyne]

Washington Post: Japan's Papers, Doomed but Going Strong

Due to a shrinking population and an expanding Internet, the decline and fall of newspapers in Japan is all but guaranteed. "I am in a dying industry," laments Kenichi Miyata, a senior editor and writer at the Asahi newspaper, a national daily with a circulation of 8 million. "Young people do not read newspapers, and our population is getting very old very rapidly." But something unexpected is happening en route to the ink-stained graveyard. Japanese newspapers are acting surprisingly spry, especially compared with their woebegone peers in the United States, where relentless declines in readership, circulation, advertising and profits have triggered buyouts, layoffs, hiring freezes and cutbacks in reportorial ambition. Nearly all of this unpleasantness is on hold in Japan, at least for the time being. While the circulation of U.S. newspapers has dropped more than 15 percent in the past decade, it has slipped just 3.2 percent here. Japan's five big national dailies have kept nearly all their readers...About one in 10 newsroom jobs in the United States has disappeared in the past decade, according to the American Society of Newspaper Editors. The Washington Post has reduced its news staff in recent years by almost a quarter. But in Japan, large-scale layoffs and buyouts of reporters and editors are unheard of. "That is sacred ground," said Megumi Tomita, director of management and circulation at the Japan Newspaper Publishers & Editors Association. "We haven't seen any decrease in the number of journalists"...Young people here, like young people in much of the developed world, don't read newspapers much. It certainly would be better for the industry if they did. But the bottom line is this: There aren't all that many young readers to lose...

...But in the meantime, older people here, like older people in much of the world, enjoy reading newspapers. "For them, it is easier to read the paper than to open their PC," said Yoshiyuki Hashiba, a professor of journalism at Sophia University in Tokyo and a former journalist for the Mainichi newspaper for 30 years...Newspaper circulation, therefore, is expected to hold up reasonably well for a while, until the elderly can no longer read newsprint and die. "We are concerned about the future," said Tomita, of the newspaper association. But until those funereal times arrive, the newspaper industry has devised a highly efficient, relatively recession-proof and almost ubiquitous method for getting newspapers into Japanese homes. Part of that method involves a calculated refusal to go whole-hog on the Internet. "We only put 20 percent of our content on the Web," said Masaki Satsuka, manager of the circulation section at the publishers and editors association...Japanese newspapers have no intention of giving away on the Web what their readers remain willing to pay for in print, according to Satsuka....Robust sales, though, are unlikely to last for long in Japan, for newspapers or for any mass-market product. The mass market itself began shrinking three years ago. Within 50 years, the population, now 127 million, will fall by a third, the government projects. Those who are still around will be the formerly young who grew up reading news on mobile phones...more...

[Mulboyne]

For comparison, here's a recent report about the decline in circulation in the US:

Most Major Papers Continue Circ Decline

For those holding out for some improvement in print circulation, this morning brings disappointment. The Audit Bureau of Circulations released the latest figures for the six- month period ending September 2008 and the report shows major drops in circulation at the big metros. According to ABC for the 507 newspapers reporting in this period, daily circulation slipped 4.6% to 38,165,848 copies. For the 571 papers, Sunday dropped 4.8% to 43,631,646 copies. For comparison purposes, in September 2007 reporting period, daily circ fell 2.6% and Sunday was down 4.6%...more...

[Buraku]

The news media has greatly changed these past years, the only 'papers' that will sell anymore are the rags showing exclusive photos up paris hilton's buttcrack follwed by some editorial abuse from some gayass fasionista making remarks about how ugly her clothes look
The Wall st journal, the London times...its all a different field these days. Anyone with any sense provides a good online service

[Kuang_Grade]

The Washington Post piece was interesting to read but more for how it was projects its own fears about itself than the little it actually covered about the J newspaper industry, since it quickly jumps over the major facts that J newspapers economic structure is vastly different than US papers (even ignoring the physical size difference between most J papers and US papers)...Historically, US papers thought themselves lucky if they managed to have subscription/cash sales cover the physical production and distribution costs of the paper, let alone cover the overhead of the newsroom...Advertising was the primary source of cash for papers in the US, with circ helping to cover some costs...In japan, it is my understanding it is the opposite..adverting covers some costs but most of the revenue is from circ. Given that advertising is reasonably related to circ (more readers equals higher rates) and the previous market locks on real estate, help wanted, ect classified advertising made US papers money machines where they tried to push out as many papers as they could sell. It is worth noting that the Post daily issue price was only 25 cents less than 4-5 years ago...it many stores it was likely the cheapest item you buy in the store.

But the internet has destroyed most of the classified business, display advertising budgets are being reduced across the board by advertisers, increased retail consolidation means there are no longer 3 department stores advertising against one another but more likely just one department store that now occasionally advertises and most papers are still stuck with relatively high cost structures from to the good old days. And it hasn't helped that many papers now don't have any idea who they are writing to and why, resulting in a 'voice' that satisfies no one, often pissing off older readers while attracting ZERO younger readers and resulting in even more circ losses. On the J side of things, since most of the money is collected through circ, there is no huge crisis happening right now and as long as they keep appealing to their audience, they can cover their cost structures OK in the near term (even with the hella large distribution networks/costs they have)...or at least until the next big flu epidemic wipes out a good chunk of their readership

What is interesting in those new ABC numbers is the trend that daily circ is holding up better than Sunday....In the past, people would drop daily but hold on to Sunday to get the TV book, coupons, ect and to stay at least remotely connected to a newspaper...The fact that Sunday losses are bigger than daily says that there is a group of readers that are dumping newspapers entirely.

[Mulboyne]

Another US development:

Christian Science Monitor Goes Online-Only

In the first of what could be a series of print newspaper closings, the Christian Science Monitor has announced the end of its daily print format and its switch to a Web-based publication. Starting April 2009, the 100-year-old news organization will no longer publish daily physical newspapers and will focus its content on the Internet. It will, however, publish a weekly print magazine. The new daily edition of the Monitor will be available by paid subscription and delivered as a PDF file via e-mail Monday through Friday. The weekly print edition will cost $3.50 per copy or $89 for a year's subscription. The print edition will feature more in-depth content on high quality 10-by-12-inch paper. The majority of the decision is based on money. The Monitor is a nonprofit financed by a church and delivered through the mail, and has seen a steady decline in readership over the past 40 years. For it to be the first print newspaper to close makes sense in these circumstances, and may not herald the immediate foreclosure of other, wealthier news organizations.

[Mulboyne]

A number of commentators often note that, unlike the US, Japan's blogosphere is undeveloped as a competitor with mainstream media. According to this writer, the US version is dead:

While there continue to be many blogs, including a lot of very good ones, it seems to me that one would be hard pressed to make the case that there's still a "blogosphere." That vast, free-wheeling, and surprisingly intimate forum where individual writers shared their observations, thoughts, and arguments outside the bounds of the traditional media is gone. Almost all of the popular blogs today are commercial ventures with teams of writers, aggressive ad-sales operations, bloated sites, and strategies of self-linking. Some are good, some are boring, but to argue that they're part of a "blogosphere" that is distinguishable from the "mainstream media" seems more and more like an act of nostalgia, if not self-delusion...It's no surprise, then, that the vast majority of blogs have been abandoned. Technorati has identified 133 million blogs since it started indexing them in 2002. But at least 94 percent of them have gone dormant, the company reports in its most recent "state of the blogosphere" study. Only 7.4 million blogs had any postings in the last 120 days, and only 1.5 million had any postings in the last seven days.

[Mulboyne]

Following the announcement by the Asahi of a mid-term loss, both the Sankei and Mainichi have revealed that they have also slipped into the red. Newspapers are being hit by declining readership and a collapse in advertising revenue. Companies in the consumer finance, pachinko, auto, real estate, insurance and banking industries have all slashed their ad budgets and there appears to be little sign of recovery. The Sankei reports that its web sites are seeing increased traffic but they are not making a significant contribution to earnings.

Japanese report here.

[Mulboyne]

Spotted on NewsonJapan.com

ReadWriteWeb: How Japanese Newspapers are Trying to Save Themselves

The newspaper industry is in a downward death spiral, having been severely impacted by new technologies, the ubiquity of internet access, and a rise in citizen journalism. Here in the U.S., some papers are filing for bankruptcy, others are close to doing the same, and there's even a proposal to give the newspaper industry a bailout plan of its own. Elsewhere in the world, it's more of the same. In Japan though, the country's high population of elderly citizens is keeping the papers afloat...for now, at least. But like everywhere else, they will soon have to face the future: young people don't do newsprint. As noted by the Washington Post in October of 2008, Japan's newspaper industry is still "surprisingly spry." The country's five big national dailies have kept nearly all their readers, only slipping 3.2 percent in circulation during the last decade. Compare that with the drop of over 15 percent in the United States, for example. Still, the industry in Japan is just as worried as everyone else because they can see the future ahead of them."I am in a dying industry," said Kenichi Miyata, a senior editor and writer at the Asahi newspaper, a daily with a circulation of 8 million. "Young people do not read newspapers, and our population is getting very old very rapidly."

In many parts of the world, individual newspaper companies are trying different things to revitalize their industry. For example, we've seen a lot of innovation from the New York Times lately, as they embrace open data and APIs. (Disclosure: The NYTimes is a syndication partner of ReadWriteWeb.) However, there's still a feeling of "it's everyone for themselves" when it comes to developing new business models. In Japan, however, three of the major newspapers have decided instead to band together. The papers are all members of the Nikkei-Asahi-Yomiuri Internet Business Partnership, a group formed nearly a year ago to launch a web site that featured all their articles together in one place.Now, those papers have once again collaborated on a new effort to bring their content to the tech-obsessed youth. Last week, the three collectively introduced an iPhone/iPod Touch application which delivers the cover stories, city news items, editorials, and pictures to the owners of Apple's smartphone. The application is unique as it lets consumers browse and compare the coverage of news stories by the different papers all within one single interface.

The application is not without its faults, though. Although it sits at the top of the free apps section in the Japanese App Store, it's not very highly rated. This is because the app doesn't provide the full text of the papers, only abstracts. In order to read the complete article, users must click a link to go to the paper's main web site. That extra effort probably frustrates users, leading to its low rating of only 2 stars. In comparison, another news organization, Sankei Shimbun, has an app which does provide the full text. In time, through download counts and popularity ratings, it should become apparent how important full text is to a newspaper app's success. At the moment, the new collective iPhone/iPod application isn't monetized, but the companies involved hope it will motivate customers to actually read the physical newspapers. We doubt that will happen, but it will certainly be interesting to follow the success or failure of this newspaper triad. Will there be safely in numbers? We don't know yet, but it's a possibility worth looking into.

[Bucky]

Hokkaido Shimbum loses some of its sisterly love for Sapporo's sister city

The Hokkaido Shimbun, northern Japan's main daily newspaper, is closing its Portland bureau and sending its star reporter home.

The newspaper is also closing its bureau in Vienna, Austria, to save money during tough financial times.

Toshimi Edagawa, the first Oregon-based staff writer for a Japanese newspaper, spent almost four years covering the Americas. He wrote on Aleutian Island natives, U.S. casualties in Iraq, the presidential campaign and many other topics.

Recently Edagawa, 45, reported from Bend on the U.S. housing crisis and from Portland on Mayor Sam Adams' scandal. He will lead a reporting team at his newspaper's headquarters in Sapporo, Portland's sister city.

Like many newspapers, The Hokkaido Shimbun has lost circulation, once nearly 2 million a day. It is keeping bureaus in Washington, D.C., Moscow, London, Cairo, Beijing, Seoul, Singapore and Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk, Russia.

http://www.oregonlive.com/business/index.ssf/2009/02/japan_newspaper_closes_portlan.html

[Mulboyne]

The Australian: Omens from the shrinking Japanese newspaper business

SOMETHING very odd happened to Sankei Shimbun's circulation recently -- close to 15 per cent of it disappeared. The decline of Sankei, the smallest of Japan's five national daily newspapers, has been sudden, steep and not well explained. The underlying reasons might be ominous for the Japanese industry generally, or a salutary warning to the others not to go where Sankei has gone, and most likely a combination of both. Newspaper executives around the world often marvel at the Japanese market. The country's newspaper sales and penetration are, without a doubt, extraordinary -- almost 51.5 million average daily sales to the end of last year. And until the end of last year, general newspaper circulation held remarkably steady, losing less than 1.5 per cent in a decade. In just the six months to September, US newspaper publishers lost 10.6 per cent of unit sales. But the Sankei January-to-June combined morning and afternoon sales dropped 14.7 per cent on the same period in 2008. The other four national dailies slipped between 0.15 per cent (Nihon Keizai Shimbun, the business newspaper popularly known as Nikkei) and 2.33 per cent (Mainichi), which is also rumoured to be struggling.

Sankei managers did an unusual thing last December. They made their Y100 cover price newspaper available free to anyone with an iPhone and are widely believed to have done something equally rash: stopped playing oshigami (pushing papers), the industry's dirty and not-so-little secret. Sankei reportedly has been forced to abandon traditional circulation padding at the same time as it grapples with the new threat of digital media leaching away the economic value of its products. Toshinao Sasaki, IT writer and former staffer at Mainichi Shimbun (almost 5.1 million daily sales in the June half-year) believes Sankei's difficulties are the edge of a blade menacing the industry. Sasaki's diagnosis is less immediately drastic than suggested by his book title, 2011 Newspaper, TV Extinction, but still inescapable in the long run, he believes. As in other Western markets, demography, economic woes and the online challenge are making their marks on the traditional Japanese newspaper market. "Currently Japanese newspapers are mainly read by middle-aged and older age groups, and subscription should not decline dramatically as long as those groups remain the central layer of society," says Sasaki. "However, newspapers' share of nationwide advertising revenue is sharply decreasing, from Y1 trillion in 2007 to the Y600 billion expected this year. "That's the direct blow to newspaper finances, rather than the subscription numbers."

Gradually the ageing but still numerous generations who take the big dailies and NHK (the Japan Broadcasting Corporation) as their principal information sources are being edged aside by the post-1980s, post-bubble cohorts -- fewer, generally less well-off, inveterate IT-adopters, much less tethered to authorised news. According to the most recent Japan Newspaper Publishers Association (NSK) readership survey, morning papers were read daily by 86 per cent of people aged 60-plus, 54 per cent of 30 to 40-year-olds, and 34 per cent of 20 to 30s. NSK finds that although 73 per cent of daily news consumers read newspapers, 69 per cent, a big overlap, access online news by mobile phones, the most common internet device in Japan. Tsutomo Kanayama, a media studies professor at Ritsumeikan University, observes even among his students -- youngsters aimed for big-city establishment news and information careers -- daily newspaper reading becomes less common and information is sourced indiscriminately. "Students will give the same weight to facts that come from a newspaper or their phones."

Decline is evident even aboard the great media galleons. Circulations would "decline little by little, not quickly, but there is no way of stopping it", Asahi Shimbun chief executive Kotaro Aakayama recently told the Financial Times. And yet Asahi in the June half-year had 11.39 million combined daily sales. Yomiuri Shimbun, the world's biggest-selling daily, claimed more than 10 million morning sales and another 3.7 million in the afternoon. (The Australian, which has its Tokyo news bureau at Yomiuri's Otemachi headquarters, sold 134,100 copies Monday-to-Friday in the most recent circulation period while The Times of London, another Yomiuri tenant, managed 588,471 daily.) Nagoya's Chinichi Shimbun (which also publishes Tokyo Shimbun) circulates more than 3.3 million, two other regionals claim one million-plus daily sales and 12 more have 500,000-plus. Combined with an overall market penetration of 612 sales per 1000 adults, according to a new World Association of Newspapers and News Publishers survey, Japan still brings tears of envy to the eyes of media executives elsewhere in the world.

However, critics such as journalist Tetsuya Kuroyabu, an industry specialist who has crusaded for years against oshigami, allege the circulations are a facade, puffed at least 20 per cent by Japanese publishers' practice of obliging distribution companies to buy newspapers far in excess of their orders from customers. Up to the bursting of Japan's bubble in the early 1990s, says Kuroyabu, distributors copped oshigami because they shared revenue from chirashi (advertising inserts), based on the number of newspapers they took. Publishers allegedly paid distributors other incentives and subsidies to keep up circulations and thus advertising rates. But as the economy slumped and direct-mail advertising spread, chirashi diminished and distributors grew less willing to accept surplus deliveries.

As the smallest national daily, Sankei was most vulnerable to distributors' push-back and finally gave up last year, according to industry talk, though it's hard to get any authoritative confirmation that oshigami even operates. "I can see no other reason," says Kuroyabu of the abrupt circulation decline. "Sankei just could not keep doing oshigami, otherwise their distribution network would collapse and then they would lose everything." The largest part of Sankei's circulation slide happened from January this year; at the end of last tear, average morning circulation stood at 2.13 million newspapers (plus 627,515 afternoon copies) and at June 30 it was 1.847 million (plus 566,811). Sankei's public relations people declined to discuss this phenomenon with Media, though its circulation department did confirm the rot continued into the second half -- average morning sales in October had fallen to 1.704 million, a further 7.7 per cent decline.

Established in Osaka 76 years ago, Sankei Shimbun formed the base of the Fujisankei Communications Group which, as with the other four national dailies, is twinned with a television network. Fujisankei also has among its extensive stable of media-related businesses a Central League baseball franchise, although the Yakult Swallows have nothing like the pedigree or brand-power of Yomiuri's Giants, who reputedly claim one of every two Japanese pro ball followers. Sankei stands at the conservative-nationalist end of the Japanese ideological spectrum among the national newspapers but, on the other hand, Fuji TV's programming is generally considered the most switched-on of the commercial networks. While the other four continue developing proprietary websites Sankei joined with Microsoft Japan with portal MSN Sankei News, competing directly against Yahoo News, the dominant online news presence.

But 12 months ago, while other newspaper executives were pondering how to monetise their online content, Sankei startled them by launching an iPhone application that downloaded the whole newspaper for free. Almost immediately the Sankei downloader became the top Japanese iPhone app, and today still ranks a respectable No 14. But as paid circulation drooped alarmingly, the industry speculated that, in the words of Facta magazine, "possibly Sankei has put a noose around its own neck". Sankei Digital people tell analysts the venture is a work in progress they want to evolve into a revenue-earning platform. But certainly none of the other big publishers is following suit.

Instead, they're intently watching Nikkei's planned launch early next year of a full-scale, multi-service, multi-delivery mode, subscription-paid digital shimbun. Word from the company's towering new Tokyo HQ suggests this project represents the Nikkei transition strategy, the most ambitious attempt anywhere to migrate online a major print-based news operation. Customer management, until now the province of the distribution companies, will be taken in-house. Nikkei thinks it sees the future and it involves stacks of unsold newspapers or free apps.

[Mulboyne]

[Taro Toporific]

[Mulboyne]

The Yomiuri says:

[matsuki]

die die die!

[FG Lurker]

die die die!

I dunno, I always felt the DY was the best of the Engrish rags in Japan. I realize that's not really saying much, but...