Ink Gushes in Japan's Media Landscape

For years, the online newspaper JanJan News mounted a scrappy challenge to Japan's blandly conformist press, offering articles written by readers who took on taboo subjects like whaling and the media's collusion with the government. But the site never attracted enough readers or advertising and was finally forced to shut down most of its operations three months ago.

JanJan was the last of four online newspapers offering reader-generated articles that were started with great fanfare here, but they have all closed or had to scale back their operations in the past two years. And it is not just the so-called citizen journalism sites that have failed here. No online journalism of any kind has yet posed a significant challenge to Japan's monolithic but sclerotic news media. "Japan just wasn't ready yet," said JanJan's president and founder, Ken Takeuchi, a former reformist mayor and newspaper journalist who started the site in 2003. "This is a hard place to create an alternative source of news."