The (Greatly Exaggerated?) Death of Print

“Pictures of a Foreign Residence in Yokohama,” Yoshikazu, 1861
Original found at Arthur M. Sackler Gallery

I was recently asked by the No. 1 Shimbun, the magazine for the Foreign Correspondents Club in Japan, to write a piece that examined whether English newspapers such as The Japan Times could survive the digital shift. I’ve included a slightly edited version of the piece for my column this month:

English newspapers have been serving the expat community in Japan since July 22, 1861, when an Englishman named H.W. Hansard first published the Nagasaki Shipping List and Advertizer for the several hundred English-speakers living in the port city.

Hansard soon moved to Yokohama, which had a larger English-speaking community, and teamed up with a Scottish fellow named John Reddie Black to publish The Japan Herald, a weekly paper. Other publications and other ambitious publishers quickly appeared on the scene: F. de Roza launched the Japan Commercial News; Charles Rickerby published The Japan Times (no relation to today’s Japan Times); Black followed up his first effort with the Japan Gazette and the literary journal The Far East. Some foreigners, including Black, even had the audacity to publish in the Japanese language. It was a wild decade for foreign publishers in Japan.

Of course, it didn’t last. The entrepreneurs either failed and moved on or continued to publish and build their readership in a more conservative way after they got big enough to attract the interest of Japanese authorities. Soon after the foreigners had begun the newspaper business in Japan, the Yomiuri, Asahi and Osaka Mainichi newspapers were born, and a century of almost unadulterated growth in the publishing business was under way.

Today’s English publishing scene in Japan has the same sort of chaotic feel as those colonial times thanks to the Internet and the digital shift. Today’s ambitious bloggers and publishers are much like J.R. Black and Co. They are mostly self-made publishers without financial sponsors or backers. They are enthusiastic, and they’re able to report from the ground on what’s going on in Japan. Only the content is different: While the Nagasaki and Yokohama papers were a mix of commerce and shipping news, today’s readers are more likely to want information on gadgets and gallery openings. Two of the more popular sites are Digital World Tokyo and Tokyo Art Beat, for example.

When they began their respective publishing ventures, Mark and Mary Devlin (founders of Metropolis) and Terrie Lloyd (founder of J@pan Inc and now the proud owner of Metropolis) had probably even less experience in publishing than Hansard, who was in the printing-press business, after all. The Devlins could be seen on the streets of Tokyo in the mid-1990s handing out their page of classified ads to passers-by. You could practically picture Hansard doing the same thing on the streets of Nagasaki 130 years earlier. Little had changed in all that time.

But then the popularization of the Internet created opportunities that the Devlins and Lloyds of the world were ready to exploit (in the interest of full disclosure, I’ve been an employee of both the Devlins and Lloyd).

The Japanese newspaper industry, perhaps the most robust newspaper industry in the world, was about as ready for the spread of the Internet as the music industry was for peer-to-peer services. Japanese newspaper executives talked of their websites in the late 1990s like my father talks about getting his flu shot. It had to be done, but it wasn’t an experience to be enjoyed. Even today, the Daily Yomiuri, the English version of the world’s largest newspaper, has an online presence that pales in comparison to many high school newspapers sites in the US (Seriously … just have a look at this site if you don’t believe me). The Yomiuri’s English site has this oddly arrogant and anachronistic linking policy to boot: “You may, in principle, link to Yomiuri Online. But The Yomiuri Shimbun reserves the right to deny a link, depending on the content of your website or linking methods.” And how does one go about enforcing that “right,” exactly?

The newspaper industry has plenty of paranoia about the digital shift and the decline in newspaper readership. So it seems natural that a recent price hike by The Japan Times has set off a wave of rumors that the only independent English newspaper in Japan is teetering on the brink. Hardly a week goes by without some statement about the imminent death of print — remember Arthur Sulzberger’s comment to Haaretz this February that he doesn’t care “whether we’ll be printing the (New York) Times in five years,” for example? The Japan Times price hike is just another sign, many people believe, that newspapers are slowly succumbing to the same fate as 8-tracks and album cover art. And once The Japan Times goes, the thin broth of local reporting in the IHT/Asahi and Daily Yomiuri will be all that’s left for the expat community, or at least that sizeable portion of the community that can’t read Japanese newspapers.

Mark Zieman, editor and vice president of the Kansas City Star, got a dose of this paranoia when his paper hosted a group of journalists from Japan recently. “One fellow kept asking questions,” Zieman recalls. “Some of his colleagues seemed to be getting upset because I guess he wasn’t supposed to ask all those questions. He kept asking the same question in different ways: ‘Aren’t you afraid that your online version (of the paper) will kill your print version?’”

Zieman’s answer to that question is “no.” Not that he is oblivious to the declining trends in newspaper reading. Far from it. “Newspaper numbers have been declining since 1950,” he points out. “To blame it all on the Internet is sort of silly. There will be more and more platforms to deliver our news in the future. This is a long-term trend.”

Recent experiences at the Kansas City Star may point the way forward for The Japan Times and other English print publications in Japan. Far from fearing the Internet, the Kansas City Star has embraced it. Zieman says the ability to track reading patterns has allowed editors to better protect their staff and build readership. “With the Web, editors are firmly in control,” he wrote in a recent edition of The American Editor. “What you do online matters — and best of all — you can measure it. With proof of your success you can then build an argument to protect your newsroom resources, even during this industry slump. It’s a beautiful thing.”

The Star’s website also had a little influence on a recent redesign of the print edition.

“We wanted to get away from the 1980s-style poster page with one long story and one huge photo,” He says. “People are used to seeing smaller pictures on their phones, so we made the pictures smaller. I wouldn’t say the new pages are busy, but there are more entries … it’s denser.”

Preliminary research shows that people are spending more time reading the paper, Zieman reports, and readership of the print version of the Star is up. “We added a mid-America digest with news from the four states surrounding Kansas City, and we run the top 10 national briefs. We’ve made the package more engaging … and the result is that the Star has never been more popular in its 126-year history.”

Let’s consider The Japan Times in this light. It has a circulation of about 40,000 in print. Its online readership consists of 8.3 million page views a month, 83,000 registered online users and 21,800 recipients of its email headlines, according to the newspaper’s media kit. The paper’s highest circulation in its history was 74,000 in 1991, according to Yukiko Ogasawara, president of The Japan Times. Of course, in 1991, the paper did not have an online presence, so it’s safe to say that in terms of people reading its news articles, The Japan Times has never been more popular in its 110-year history.

But revenue is still hard to come by online.

Patience, Zieman counsels. “If you are the place people turn to to get their news, eventually, those dimes will grow into dollars and the revenue will come. But will it come in time to save English newspapers in Japan? Maybe the Mainichi Daily News had the right idea when it abandoned its print edition in 2001. The MDN claims an average of 10 million page views a month and boasts that it is the “top English language news site” in Japan. Its WaiWai translations of racy articles in the Japanese weeklies are read all over the world these days.

“Call me conservative, but I find it hard to envision a credible print media without something in print,” Arudou Debito writes on his blog when asked whether a version of The Japan Times with more reporters and no paper presence would be preferable to the current situation. As long as others share his view, the rumors of English print’s death in Japan are liable to remain greatly — or at least somewhat — exaggerated.

The experiences at the Kansas City Star or the Times-Picayune after the levees broke in New Orleans show that a strong online presence can invigorate a newspaper. Yet models for financial success online remain largely uncharted.

In the 1860s, foreign publishers in Japan showed the way forward in their own chaotic fashion. Perhaps in this decade, history is repeating itself.