JANJAN

» see janjan.jp as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

A Japanese-language news site is invisible from Turkey in a way an English one is not. JANJAN published in Japanese about a Japanese argument, and I have no memory of the site at all. What I recognize is the shape of it. The people doing the writing were not journalists, and the journalists took that as an insult rather than as competition. That fight ran on Turkish forums too, in a smaller key and about smaller things.

The name stood for Japan Alternative News for Justices and New Cultures, which tells you the register it was pitched in. It launched in February 2003 under Japan Internet News, a company owned by the system integrator Fujisoft, and it was run by Ken Takeuchi. Takeuchi had been a reporter at Asahi Shimbun and then mayor of Kamakura, where he abolished the city's press club. That biography is the whole editorial line in one sentence.

The press club system, kisha kurabu, is the thing JANJAN existed to attack. Access to ministries and to police headquarters runs through clubs whose membership is effectively limited to the big established outlets, which produces a press corps that is inside the room and dependent on staying there. JANJAN's answer was to skip the room entirely. Anyone could register and file. By its fifth birthday around five thousand people had, and the overwhelming majority of them were writing for nothing.

Takeuchi told the Christian Science Monitor in 2008 that he wanted JANJAN to be Japan's leading media outlet within another five years. It had two years left.

~ the record ~

~ how it landed ~

For a few years around 2005 the citizen-journalism argument looked like it was going to be won on the merits. OhmyNews in South Korea was the proof case everyone pointed at, having demonstrably moved a presidential election, and JANJAN was the Japanese entry in the same wave. The coverage of the period treats these sites as an emerging tier of the press rather than as an experiment.

What JANJAN actually published was local. Municipal council decisions and prefectural disputes that no national desk would send a reporter to cover. This is the strongest possible case for the model and also the least commercially valuable journalism there is, which is the trap the whole category walked into.

~ the fall ~

Volunteer labor is free at the point of writing and expensive everywhere else. Somebody still has to edit, fact-check, host and answer the lawyers, and a site publishing five thousand amateurs needs more of that per article rather than less. JANJAN carried those costs against display advertising in a market where a Japanese newspaper's own site was already giving the news away.

The registration system also carried a detail that has aged into something strange. Potential posters were routed through different sign-up flows depending on nationality, which is a decision that would be difficult to explain now and was already odd for a publication built on the idea that anyone should be able to speak.

~ the postmortem ~

There was no scandal and no lawsuit. Revenue did not arrive, and at the end of March 2010 publication stopped. In May the operation came back as JanJanBlog, which was the same idea with the overhead cut down to the bone, and that ran until 31 December 2013.

The category did not survive in Japan either. The wave of local citizen-journalism sites thinned out over the following years and the function JANJAN was performing moved onto Twitter and onto individual blogs, where it is done by people who are not edited and not paid. Both of those were already true at JANJAN. The editing was the part that cost money.

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