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.