SOAS, University of London (The School of Oriental and African Studies)

Japanese newspapers in a changing media environment

Abstract

When in the late 1980s newspaper publishers all around the world started worrying about decreasing readership and eagerly tried to stop the trend by re-designing their products, the Japanese press still did not see the necessity to change its conservative product-strategy. At that time circulation and household dissemination figures were high, the newspaper industry was prospering and the internet as an alternative mass media infrastructure was yet to surface. But the times have changed and now the repercussions of their lethargy in the past exert tremendous pressure on the newspapers in Japan.
My talk will focus on the characteristics of the Japanese daily press and the newspaper market. I will try to point out the basic features of the Japanese publishers’ conservative product-strategy, how the newspapers nowadays are trying to respond to the digital challenge and what obstacles they have to face.

Speaker Biography

Marc Loehr has been teaching mass communication at the Faculty of Economics at Yamaguchi University for nearly 20 years and presently is a professor at the faculty’s Seminar for Tourism and Travel Industry Policy. For a long time his research has been focusing on the Japanese press, culminating in a doctoral thesis (Trier University, 2007) about patterns and the variety of daily newspapers in the country. Presently his main research interest is the relation between sports and mass media in Japan, in particular the recent running boom and how the mass media are communicating it to their audiences.