The website is designed to bring national news through local angles. The Kyodo News Agency will provide the national news but in depth coverage will come form the nearest newspaper to the geographic centre of the story. There are national newspapers (and their websites) in Japan, which cover the same news through satellite journalists but they don’t necessarily know the area. This can mean that it takes longer to get a story and the full implications of an event may not be understood. Newspapers from all forty-seven Japanese prefectures are involved in 47news.jp enabling the news site to be supported by over 10,000 professional journalists. They are mostly raised in the area that is being reported on, have local knowledge, more sources of information and know the history of the region. This should make the news more relevant to the public.

The idea of 47news.jp has been popular amongst Japanese newspapers. The combined circulation of the newspapers involved is 25million, ranging individually from 100,000 to 3million. Not only has more than one newspaper from some prefectures signed up but two of the newspapers taking part are national (there are currently fifty-two newspapers in total). These two national newspapers, Nikkei and Sankei, will be involved at a local level relevant to their specific expertise, for example Nikkei will be providing local economic news from Tokyo.

The 47news.jp site is split into several sections including news, politics, sports and tourism with information coming from all prefectures based on importance. There is also a celebrity/movie section provided by the Kyodo News Agency, which they have been developing specifically for this project for some time. For the more local element, each prefecture will have three headlines on the homepage and up to fifty headlines when clicked through to the individual newspaper site.

This strategy is in complete reverse to the new restructure of American publisher, Gannett, where there is a focus on local first. The Zenkoku Shinbum Network doesn’t believe the same strategy would work as effectively in Japan. Each local or regional newspaper involved has its own site for solely reporting on local news but they think that Japan needs a site that starts with the main news and then allows readers to drill down into their own area.

Maybe because of this strategy, newspapers involved haven’t had to make any changes to their day-to-day routine. The information on 47news.jp comes from RSS feeds and web crawling which is overseen centrally so that no direct input from the individual newspapers is necessary on a daily basis. The newspapers will however be expected to contribute one feature article on a rotational basis but this can be something that has been used in one of the titles itself. Also, each newspaper will provide one photo per day to enhance the graphics on the site.

There are just ten full time employees working solely for 47news.jp. Four of these are full time editors, one of which has been seconded from one of the newspapers for a four-month placement. 47news.jp hopes that this will be cyclical for all papers involved enabling influence to the site from all around the country.

Advertising will also be managed centrally but will not be fully in place until potential advertisers can see the site up and running. They will look for major, national companies such as Toyota and offer banner advertising. How revenues will be split up amongst the titles involved is not known. They hope to increase site traffic over the first few months to have a better idea of revenues before this decision is made. Mr Kenichiro Hayashi at 47news.jp expects fifty million hits per month by the end of March.

Hayashi has many plans for the future of 47news.jp. Firstly expanding the interaction to the site from voting on photos to include multimedia such as videos. Citizen journalism is not something that 47news.jp will focus on (another strong difference to US strategies) as he believes the network of 10,000 professional journalists will provide more reliable information. Lastly, and most interestingly, Hayashi is not adverse to the role reversal of moving the 47news.jp online product into print form.

For readers, 47news.jp appears to bring a truly national sense of news with a local feel. For newspapers, it gives a chance to take local news national, increasing their exposure and circulations hopefully leading to revenue gains.


Source: 47news.jp and interview with Mr Kenichiro Hayashi at Zenkoku Shimbun Network.