JWN (全国新聞ニュース網)

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

~ the obit ~

JWN was run by seven companies that published eight newspapers, and that extra paper is the first thing anybody has to explain. The Tokyo Shimbun is printed by the Chunichi Shimbun's Tokyo head office, so it counts as a paper and not as a company. The council that ran the site called itself the 7社協議会, the Seven-Company Council, and the number in the name is the number of companies rather than the number of mastheads.

The site opened in 1998. The oldest surviving capture is from 3 December that year and already shows a working portal carrying the previous day's headlines from five papers, with the Hokkaido Shimbun at one end of the country and the Nishinippon at the other. Niigata Nippo and the Kobe Shimbun joined somewhere between February 2000 and February 2001, and after that the membership did not change again for sixteen years. From October 2008 the site also carried the nickname 「北から南ナビ」, the north-to-south navigator. What the papers built was partly a shared front page keyed to a clickable map of Japan, with one photo story per paper per day, and partly a standing disaster and accident feed, which is the part they actually advertised. Every paper kept its own separate site throughout, linked from the JWN header and tagged as external.

It ended in two stages. On 31 March 2017 the papers stopped updating and withdrew the cross-paper link roll, and on 30 June the web server was switched off. On that last update day the site went on publishing its eight photo stories directly underneath its own death notice, one from each paper, finishing with the Nishinippon's 「全身どろどろ、作柄占う」, caked in mud, divining the harvest.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ the arithmetic of the council ~

The Kobe Shimbun's editor-in-chief explained the sum himself in a 2008 column, listing the eight mastheads and then heading off the obvious objection: 「えっ、８社じゃないの」, eh, isn't that eight companies. He also described what the council physically was, which is the useful part. The editors-in-chief and their deputies from all eight papers would gather in one room and talk about exchanging articles. The website was the public face of an editorial arrangement that existed first.

You can watch the duty rotate through the contact address. In 2003 the webmaster was [email protected], up in Sapporo. By 2017 it was [email protected], and the disaster section had moved under the Tokyo directory too. Nobody owned the thing. They passed it around.

~ the portal built to replace it ~

47NEWS launched in December 2006, operated by a company called 全国新聞ネット and headquartered inside Kyodo News' tower in Shiodome, pooling 52 papers instead of eight. It is worth saying slowly that this was not a rival arrangement and JWN was not a holdout against Kyodo. All seven JWN companies were Kyodo members or contract papers and all of them joined 47NEWS as well. The council's own exchange ran alongside the wire service rather than instead of it.

What is strange is simply that JWN kept going. The national portal that pooled every paper in the country arrived eight years after the regional one, and the regional one then ran in parallel for another ten and a half years before stopping on its own. One quirk of the membership is worth noting: the Tokyo Shimbun was a full member paper of JWN but is not separately enrolled in 47NEWS, where it appears only through its parent.

~ the wrong date on its own farewell ~

The closing notice thanks readers for using the site 「2003年7月4日より今まで」, from 4 July 2003 until now. That date is wrong. It is simply the oldest item still sitting in the site's own content archive. Whoever wrote the farewell dated the site from the oldest thing they could still see on it, and Japanese Wikipedia then copied the error into its opening line, which is where the number in most databases comes from. The 1998 captures and the site's own 「Copyright (C)1998-2003」 footer both say otherwise.

The same notice contains a grammatical slip, 「本サイトを閉鎖をさせて」, with the particle を used twice where one belongs. Nobody proofread it.

~ the newsroom that moved in afterwards ~

After June 2017 the domain lapsed. By mid-2021 jwn.ne.jp was a registrar parking page promising a future home, and from 2024 it has served something called Signal Desk, whose own description calls it a fictional digital newsroom. The address returns HTTP 200 today and search engines still print the old Japanese title against it, so from the outside it reads like a site that never died.

All eight papers are still publishing, each on its own domain. The only thing that went was the room they shared, and a made-up newsroom moved into it.

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