In many parts of the wired world, the Internet is having a profound effect on traditional media. News has become entertainment, information has become ubiquitous, and geopolitics has become a local event. We're each other's electronic next-door neighbors in this global village, and the Web is starting to intermediate most if not all aspects of our public and private interactions. Under the Net's intense 24/7, hyper-competitive pressure, book publishers, newspaper conglomerates, and radio and TV broadcasters in many countries are reinventing themselves as "online" media while struggling to make content delivered via the new electronic channels pay.
In Japan, however, the transformation has only just begun. The traditional media giants still dominate through their almost total control of audience mindshare and of old-media channels like broadcast, print and publishing. The conglomerates also have an iron lock on physical distribution.
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"Japan has started down the path to its Internet future, and we've only just begun to see the freeing of the press. No one knows what the final outcome will be, but at least some of the threads of change are already apparent." |
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Yet change has started. Japan -- home to one of the world's most literate populations -- is moving to the Web at a quickening pace. This country hosts the world's largest mobile portal, for instance, and broadband access is finally coming to the masses. Japan's media scene has already felt the first whisper-like flutterings of the chaos-theory butterfly born of the Net, and when the online tempest hits, the Japanese may just become the world's leading consumers of online media.The power wielded by old media in Japan hasn't diminished much in the last half-century. While technology and other agents of change have certainly reshaped how media makes its presence felt, the dominance itself has endured. Japan's venerable media are everything that the Internet isn't: anonymous, paternalistic, and fixedly one-way. They're also strongly endorsed by the entrenched power elite. The five big newspaper-centric groupings dominate Japan's media scene, with their national distribution, tremendous brand images, and ownership of TV broadcasters, radio stations, English-language dailies, magazine and business publishing divisions (particularly in the case of Nikkei), baseball teams, and numerous other enterprises. In addition to newspapers and television, readers voraciously snap up thousands of monthly and weekly magazines: Some 200 new titles each year are introduced into Japan's magazine market, according to Masahiko Motoki, head of publisher Kodansha's planning division and editor in chief of Web Gendai.
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