TOKYO, Jan. 27, 2024—When you’re feeling sick and tired, you typically feign healthy composure to people or hide in your room as frail cats do. That may be what’s eating the Japanese media landscape.
Over the past week, the U.S. and European media had been abuzz with news of of leading newspaper and magazine publishers disclosing editorial downsizing and ownership changes.
The Los Angeles Times reportedly is on the brink of slicing 10 percent of its newsroom staff, which the newspaper cut back deeply in 2023. Last week, The Arena Group, publisher of the Sports Illustrated told its editorial that its entire staff will be let go. And the Baltimore Sun has a new owner who wants to make the paper’s core management policy around profit-making, not on giving unbiased news to the local community.
There are dozens of more newsroom downsizing, coverage cutbacks and shift toward profit-making ownership and management changes in the U.S. media. And that’s not in the U.S. alone. BBC late last year said it was curtailing night-time news broadcasting to save cost.
Those developments already have been reported widely around the world, but in Japan, hardly at all except by Japan Time, an English language newspaper and perhaps a few more.
For reasons of preventing outside influences and to ensure independence – which critics say is superficial – no top Japanese newspaper shares are publicly listed. Television media entities’ shares are traded but they are subject to strict government shareholding and other regulations.
Among few shreds of information publicly available is the Japan Audit Bureau of Circulation (ABC) data on newspaper and magazine circulations. Unsurprisingly, newspaper circulations are shrinking fast in Japan as news hungry readers switch to smart phones and others quit subscriptions to rely on SNSs for news.
So, in a nutshell, the real business condition of the Japanese media as a whole is covered by smoke screens. Top papers, like Yomiuri, and Nikkei financial daily are believed to be better off than others because they manage not only journalistic businesses but also a wide array of other sectors. Yomiuri owns the Yomiuri Giants pro ball team and manages the Yomiuriland amusement park among many.
But they zipped their lips to what’s happening across the Pacific because their journalism business is believed to be worse than generally thought, thus they do not want the public to know the hard truth. In what seemed to underscore the industry’s plight, most major newspaper and television entities did not send news crew to the Noto Peninsular earthquake sites during the first several days after it struck the area on Jan. 1, 2024, except to fly helicopters for shooting aerial views of the disaster initially.
Media management might have weighed the cost of coverage, which would have been steep as crew had to reach scenes by foot, from the sea and air, while cancelling high-priced New Year ads.
Japanese media entities thus do not want to report about overseas media difficulties to avoid public scrutiny into home country entities’ conditions.
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