Japanese Newspapers: Losing Out Online

23 Sep 2014

By David Levy 

To a visiting European, Japanese news organisations appear to be thriving. Newspaper circulations are high, print subscriptions are strong, and newsrooms are hiring ever more journalists. Yet, things may not be as good as they seem. I’ve just returned from a brief visit to Tokyo, to visit a range of news organisations there. One aim was to answer some of the many questions raised by the Japanese data, gathered as part of the 2014 Reuters Institute Digital News Report. Foremost was why a country that has one of the highest levels of newspaper readership in the world is also the one where the news environment was the most disrupted by new digital players. Japan was the only country, of  the ten that we surveyed, where a news aggregator – in this case Yahoo Japan – had more than 50% of online weekly news use. View the full article on the European Journalism Observatory website