BLOGOS

» see blogos.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

BLOGOS opened in October 2009 as one page inside livedoor, Japan's second-tier portal, and the pitch was that it would carry the opinions of people who already had opinions somewhere else. Members of parliament and university economists, mostly. The editors did not commission any of it. They asked for permission to republish blog posts that already existed, put them under one masthead, and sold advertising against the traffic.

The owner was NHN Japan, the Japanese arm of the Korean search company Naver. NHN Japan became LINE, and LINE became the app that everybody in Japan used to message everybody else, so for most of its life BLOGOS was a political opinion site owned by a chat company owned by a Korean portal. It also spun off a baseball edition and a soccer edition, both of which were folded back into livedoor Sports on 30 April 2014.

Nobody got paid. That was the model and it was also the weak joint in it. A writer who disliked the headline BLOGOS put on their post, or disliked whose post it ran beside, could withdraw permission and walk away, and Japanese blogs from that decade still carry entries explaining exactly why the author stopped letting the site take their work.

Twelve years of Japanese political argument ran through it, in a language I cannot read, on a portal I have never held an account on. What made me stop on this one is the cause of death, which is unusual enough to be worth writing down.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ the comments came off ~

Readers signed in with a Facebook or Twitter account and argued underneath. For a Japanese opinion site around 2012 that was most of the appeal, and comment volume was what the ad rates sat on. In 2020 BLOGOS removed the comment function outright, citing the rise in defamation.

The figures published when it closed put the site at 35 million page views in the final quarter of 2020 and 20 million by the third quarter of 2021. The reporting tied that fall to the missing comments, and to LINE deciding the numbers no longer justified the operation.

~ september 2016 ~

On 19 September 2016 the editors republished, unedited, a post by a former television announcer arguing that dialysis patients who had brought their condition on themselves should carry the full cost of their own treatment, with a headline that said to let them die if they could not. It ran about two months after the Sagamihara care home killings, while Japan was already arguing about Nazi euthanasia policy and about the cost of public medicine, and the timing is part of why it caught fire.

The editors refused the demands to pull it, on the grounds that the question underneath it was one that should be debated. The next day they asked the author to reconsider his wording. On 22 September he published a supplementary note declining to correct or apologize for anything, and at noon the editors deleted both pieces and apologized for having published without the internal checks that were supposed to exist. Republishing at volume works until one of the things you republish is that.

~ the last two months ~

LINE announced the closure on 1 March 2022. Updates stopped on 31 March, the same day Engadget's Japanese edition ended, and the site itself went dark on 31 May. ITmedia's write-up put BLOGOS in a line with cakes and SlowNews, other Japanese media properties shut around the same time, so by then it read as a company clearing a shelf.

A selection of the editorial team's own interviews and original articles was moved into a BLOGOS archive section on livedoor News. Everything that had been republished from somebody else's blog was deleted. blogos.com has served nothing since except a notice page with the date on it.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »