IN TOKYO
THE Japanese media - radio, television and newspapers – is in trouble as their traditional business models are slowly disintegrating.
On March 15, key radio stations in the Tokyo and the Osaka areas began broadcasting through the Internet as well in a bid to win back listeners.
But the initiative, orchestrated by advertising giant Dentsu, may already be too late.
Radio advertising revenue peaked at 240 billion yen in 1992 but fell to just over half, or 137 billion yen, last year.
Many radio stations have had to drop big-name guests from their shows for lack of sponsors.
In the past, Japanese teenagers often studied late into the night, with midnight radio talk shows their only company.
These days, radio sets are a rarity in many Japanese homes.
For audio visual entertainment, young people need only turn on their notebook computers and log on to the Internet.
Television stations have also been badly gored by the Internet.
Young people – and that includes Japanese below the age of 35 - who spend two hours or more each day viewing video content at popular sites like nicovideo.jp are likely to be doing so at the expense of watching television.
TV stations have been hit by the double whammy of declining sponsors due to the poor economy and falling viewership due to the encroachment of the Internet.
Lower revenue means the stations have less money to pour into producing quality programmes, which in turns means less viewers, leading to a vicious spiral.
To capture the Internet crowd, one TV station has taken to producing made-for-Internet video content as well.
Success is not assured however.
It is said that many young Japanese do not bother to check programme listings to see what’s on the air.
Instead, they check the latest Internet buzz to see if there’s anything worth watching at all. Most days, unfortunately there probably isn’t.
These days, the bulk of Japanese television programmes aimed at the young, or the young-at-heart, consists of quiz shows and talk shows, many of them hosted by up-and-coming comedians because the latter do not command high fees.
Viewer preferences are also rapidly changing.
Given Japan’s superb Internet infrastructure and the latest Internet technologies, it is now possible, using services such as Ustream, for anyone with a web camera and a notebook computer to make instant netcasts.
And the Japanese have of late developed a taste for “dadamore” (literally “continual stream”) shows – unedited live video of virtually unscripted events such as talk fests featuring well-known bloggers and other icons of Japan’s Internet world.
At any given time of the day, nicovideo.com offers a variety of live “programmes” that are just a mouse click away.
Also increasingly popular these days are unedited netcasts – both recorded and live - of press conferences held by key political and business figures.
Until recently, the man in the street was only able to see such well known people in newspaper articles or video news clips that have been heavily edited.
Now, anyone with access to the Net can view a press conference in the raw and compare what they see or hear to what newspapers and television actually report.
Most times, it is quite clear that the media has an agenda of its own, and sometimes even an axe to grind.
For instance, in the past year or so, it has become increasingly apparently that the media has joined hands with the bureaucracy to bring down one man – political kingpin Ichiro Ozawa, who is currently secretary general of the ruling Democratic Party of Japan.
Somehow media companies seem always to be conducting opinion polls just hours after a scandal breaks, which invariably brings down the popularity ratings of the government as well as dents Ozawa’s own stature.
Conspiracy theories naturally abound.
Some say that the media is gunning for Ozawa because he wants to dismantle the cross-holding of shares between newspaper companies and TV stations.
Japan is said to be the only major developed nation to allow newspaper companies to own and control TV stations.
Meanwhile, the bureaucracy is said to want to get rid of Ozawa because the veteran politician has always wanted to loosen the bureaucracy’s grip on policy- making.
He is also one of the few politicians around who can see through the political games played by bureaucrats.
In particular, the public prosecutor’s office, which failed in an earlier bid to nail Ozawa over a political funds control offence, is said to interested in seeing Ozawa go too as he wants to change the way investigations are carried out by having them recorded and videotaped.
At the same time, newspapers are also fighting for their own survival.
Numerous attempts in recent years to make evening editions of newspapers more colourful and entertainment-oriented have failed to raise circulation, especially among young Japanese.
After all, they can read the news for free on the Internet. Anyway, most people do not need more information than what news headlines provide.
On the morning rush hour trains, it is becoming less common to see commuters reading newspapers. Instead, they are staring into cellphones, which have become the medium of choice for gleaning information.
The leading business daily Nikkei recently launched a comprehensive web edition that is likely to further reinforce this cell phone reading habit.
There is also growing dissatisfaction with the fact that newspapers lack an interactive element.
To give the paper a “human face” and to get direct feedback from readers, the influential Asahi Shimbun daily now has a team of staff who send out tweets on Twitter every evening.
The tweets are not aimed at selling the paper directly. That would be too unsubtle.
Instead, the Asahi employees attempt to convey the excitement in the newsroom by tweeting about how the paper is being laid out, what to look out for in the next edition, and even such things as whether their Washington correspondent can file his report on schedule.
At times, Asahi’s correspondents are also roped in to tweet about what is happening in their territories.
The Asahi staff also answer queries almost immediately, and in that way give the paper an interactive feel.
In every sector of Japan’s media industry, new business models are clearly in the making.