While much of the news industry is facing serious problems in the face of the looming digital age of the media, Japan appears to be having the exact opposite problem. The New York Times reports that the failure of JanJan News, an online news source in Japan, indicated Japan's resistance to online media. "JanJan was the last of four online newspapers offering reader-generated articles that were started with great fanfare here," writes Martin Fackler, "but they have all closed or had to scale back their operations in the past 2 years."

JanJan was an online news sources that offered reader-generated articles. Although the site started with a great amount of hype, it has been unable to sustain itself. Yet, the problem is not the citizen journalism aspect of the news site--no online journal has been able to succeed in Japan.

Despite the growing threat of digital media take-over in other parts of the world, Japan's media landscape has remained untouched, and JanJan is just one example. JanJan's president and founder Ken Takeuchi says "Japan just wasn't ready yet. This is a hard place to create an alternative source of news."

It is this very quality that makes newspapers in Japan so curious. Fackler offers a few explanations for what could give Japan this quality. He suggests that the digital revolution has yet to hit Japan with the same force as it did in the United States. Moreover, he claims that the media landscape of Japan is still dominated by the same industry giants that have been in power for decades. Others have suggested that Japan's resistance to online news is a result of the relative absence of social and political divisions.

Yet Japan's landscape is slowly changing. Over the past decade circulation of the Ashahi Shimbun has dropped by 3 percent. While this drop certainly isn't disastrous for the publication, it does show that change is a least possible in Japan's media landscape.

However, it is surprising, considering the present day problems of print journalism, that Japan would find itself in this position. While it may not be good news for Takeuchi and his online news source, it is an intriguing case study for struggling print journals across the globe.

While online journals in the past have been unsuccessful, Shin Mizukoshi, professor of information studies at the University of Tokyo, suggests that the horizon of the Japanese media landscape could be different. "JanJan failed, but there will be other who try to do the same thing," He says. "JanJan has planted the seed."

Sources: New York Times