This month, The Wall Street Journal and Dow Jones announced they plan to establish a joint
venture to launch a WSJ Japanese edition in Japan. The site’s main offerings
are expected to include WSJ articles and columns translated into Japanese,
as well as a complete lineup of the paper’s multimedia content. It will also
set up a mobile service to deliver news through cell phones. WSJ has already
launched Chinese, Spanish and Portuguese editions. Known as the most profitable
newspaper in the United States, The Wall Street Journal seems to be trying to survive the journalism
cataclysm by expanding to become multilingual. This is a smart move, but is this a way all newspapers and media can find a means of survival? Maybe not. I think this
is a strategy only WSJ can adopt. WSJ is selling a commodity that shares a common
global concern, the “economy”. Other newspapers are “local” in a sense, in terms that all the newspapers are mainly focused on domestic issues.

posted by Keiichi

The Japanese Ministry of Telecommunications (JMT) announced that they expect traffic on domestic internet traffic be at stake in three years. They also suggest that all the providers should set a cap on their customer’s Internet usage. According to the JMT, the quantity of data on the net last year was 812G/sec, equivalent to more than two millions of DVD-R data. The number has increased more than twice in last three years. JMT attributes the spike to the on demand video services that have been taking over the rental videos for the last three years.

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