Wall Street Journal Plans Japanese Website

[Mulboyne]

SMH: Wall St Journal to launch Japanese site
The Wall Street Journal will launch a Japanese-language website by the end of the year, reaching out to more readers in Asia's biggest economy, its local partner SBI Holdings Inc said on Thursday. It will be the second non-English website for the Journal, which is published by Dow Jones & Co, in addition to the Chinese version which began in 2002. The venture, to be called Wall Street Journal Japan KK, will be owned 60 per cent by Dow Jones and 40 per cent by SBI, a Japanese financial services provider, a statement said.

Related FG thread: Yomiuri Inks Agreement With The Wall Street Journal

[Mulboyne]

Here it is

[Number11]

Looks wonderful! More of the same news, stories, faces and general crap shoveled on our heads every day by "main-stream media." How exciting.

The world is crap.

[omae mona]

Looks wonderful! More of the same news, stories, faces and general crap shoveled on our heads every day by "main-stream media." How exciting.

The world is crap.

It may be the same crap to us. But I think it might be interesting for Japanese readers to have a foreign news source, presumably not so much influenced by the Japanese press clubs, writing in Japanese. There aren't a lot of those.

Mulb, that site seems to be only half-way open so far. It's not even linked to from the main WSJ site yet (unlike the Chinese version), and attempting to log in with a WSJ account leads to ugly server error messages.

[Number11]

I understand your point, but the WSJ could be the least controversial newspaper on the planet. Do you think that it's going to publish something that does not fit the party line for business and the government? I don't think so. I see it publishing more bland CEO worship interviews and corporate advertising masquerading as journalism.

It thrives on advertising and it will publish nothing that turns business advertisers off. It is trying to compete against the Nikkei shimbun since it has a monopoly here. It will garner no more than 10% market share of advertising yen.

I predict it will be a novelty for a year, followed by a "rebirth" to improve the ailing bottom line by adding English stories written at an eight-year old level, to finally closing 5 years from now.

[gkanai]

Lets hope they keep the pay wall down...

[Kuang_Grade]

Actually, the WSJ under murdoch has gotten alot less dowdy in both its tone and coverage. While changes along these lines were taking place prior to the sale to News Corp, since then it has become much more pointed in both its overall tone and coverage. Previously, it would be pretty rare for the WSJ to break a big news story beyond wall street, and even then it would likely be a business story like a big merger. Over the last year alone, the WSJ has broken more than few big non business stories, such as today's 'insurgents are watching the video feeds off US drones'. On the down side, it is much more common to see stories with fairly obvious slants on the front page, although they are typically murdoch-ian in that they are vaguely pro business and populist at the same time.